by Garth Nix
“Yes,” said Kirrith, resplendent in her own white robe, the circlet of silver and moonstones secure on her white-blond head. “I noticed your old one was too short, not really seemly, with the way you’ve grown. . . .”
She kept on talking, but Lirael didn’t hear a word. Nothing seemed real anymore. Not the new tunic in her hands. Not Aunt Kirrith talking away. Nothing.
“Come on then, get dressed!” Kirrith encouraged her, straightening the folds of her own robe. She was a large and tall woman, one of the tallest of the Clayr. Lirael felt very small in front of her, and somehow dirty compared to the great expanse of white that was Kirrith’s robe. She stared at that whiteness and began to think again of ice and snow.
She was lost in her thoughts when Kirrith tapped her on the shoulder.
“What?” Lirael asked, realizing that she’d missed most of Kirrith’s words.
“Get dressed!” repeated Aunt Kirrith. A slight frown folded the skin on her forehead, making her circlet move down and shadow her eyes. “It would be terribly rude to be late.”
Mechanically, Lirael pulled off her old tunic and slipped on the new one. It was heavy linen, stiff with newness, so she struggled a little with it, till Aunt Kirrith pulled it down smartly. When her arms were through and the tunic settled on her shoulders, it reached just above her ankles.
“Plenty of room for growth,” remarked Aunt Kirrith with satisfaction. “Now we really must get on.”
Lirael looked down at the sea of blue cloth that swathed her entire body, and thought that there was more room than she could ever possibly fill. Aunt Kirrith must expect her never to wear the white of the Awakening, for this tunic would fit even if she kept on growing till she was thirty-five.
“You go on—I’ll catch up in a minute,” she lied, thinking of the Starmount Stair, the cliffs beyond, and the waiting ice. “I have to go to the toilet.”
“Very well,” said Kirrith as she hurried back out into the corridor. “But be quick, Lirael! Think of what your mother would say!”
Lirael followed her, turning left towards the nearest water closet. Kirrith turned right, clapping her hands to hasten on a trio of eight-year-olds who were dressing as they walked, their tunics half over their heads, smothering giggles.
Lirael had no idea what her mother would have said about anything. She had been teased about Arielle often enough when she was younger, before she became too much of an outsider to be teased. It was quite normal for the Clayr to seek casual lovers from visitors to the Glacier, and not even that uncommon to find one outside. But it was unheard of not to record the parentage of children.
Her mother had compounded her strangeness by leaving the Glacier—and a five-year-old Lirael—called by some vision she had not shared with the other Clayr. Years later, Aunt Kirrith had told Lirael that Arielle was dead, though no details ever came. Lirael had heard various theories, including Arielle being poisoned by jealous rivals in the court of some barbarian lordling in the frozen wastes of the North or killed by beasts. Apparently she’d been serving as a seer, something that no Clayr would think was a suitable occupation for people of their Blood.
The pain of losing her mother was locked away in Lirael’s heart, but not so deep it could not be uncovered. Aunt Kirrith was an expert at bringing it back.
Once Kirrith and the three suddenly chastened girls were gone, Lirael doubled back to her room and got her outdoor gear: a coat of heavy wool, greasy with lanolin; a cap of double felt with earflaps; oilskin overshoes; fur-lined gloves; and leather goggles with lenses of smoked green glass. Part of her said it was stupid to get these things, since she was going to her death anyway, but another small voice inside her said that she might as well be properly dressed.
Because all the inhabited parts of the Clayr’s domain were heated by steam piped up from the deep springs, Lirael carried her outdoor gear, the smaller items wrapped in the coat. It was going to be hot enough climbing the Starmount Stair without wearing all that wool. As a last-minute gesture of defiance, she pulled off the new tunic and threw it on the floor. Instead, she chose to put on the neutral garments worn when the Clayr were on kitchen or scullery duty in the Lower Refectory, a long grey cotton shirt that came down to the knees, over thin blue woollen leggings. There was a canvas apron that went with this ensemble, but Lirael left that behind.
It was strange slinking down the Northway with no one in sight. Normally, there would be dozens of the Clayr going about their business on this busy thoroughfare, either heading to or from the Nine Day Watch or engaged in the myriad more mundane tasks of the community. The Clayr’s Glacier was really a small town, albeit a very strange one, since its primary business was to look into the future. Or, as the Clayr had to constantly explain to visitors, the numerous possible futures.
At the point where the Northway met the Zigzag, Lirael made sure she was unobserved. Then she went a few steps along the first zig of the Zigzag, looking for a small, dark hole at waist height. When she found it, she took out the key she wore on a chain around her neck. All the Clayr had such keys, and they opened most of the common doors. The Starmount Door was not often used, but Lirael didn’t think it needed a special key.
There was no sign of a door around the keyhole until Lirael put in the key and turned it twice. Then a faint silvery line spread from the floor and slowly traced a doorway in the yellowish stone.
Lirael pushed the door open. Cold air rushed in, so she went through quickly. If there were any other people about, they would notice a cold breeze more quickly than anything else. The Clayr might live in a mountain that was half smothered by a glacier, but they didn’t revel in the cold.
The door swung shut behind Lirael, and the silver lines that marked its outline slowly faded. Ahead of her, the steps rose up in a straight line, the Charter marks above them providing light that was dimmer than that in the main halls. The risers were higher than usual, something Lirael hadn’t remembered from a class excursion many years before, when all steps had seemed high. She grimaced as she started to climb, knowing that her calf muscles would soon protest the extra six-inch rise.
There was a bronze handrail for the first hundred or so steps, where the Stair went up in a dead straight line. Lirael gripped it as she climbed, the cool of the metal soothing under her hand. As was her habit, she started counting steps, the regular rhythm temporarily banishing the mental images of herself falling down an endless slope of ice.
She hardly noticed when the handrail stopped and the steps began to turn inwards, into the long spiral that would take her to the top of the mountain, Starmount. Its sister peak was Sunfall, and the two mountains held the glacier between them. The glacier had once had its own name, but it was long forgotten. So for thousands of years it had been called after the Clayr who lived above, beside, and sometimes beneath it. Over time that name had come to be extended to the Clayr’s realm as well, so both the great mass of ice and the halls of stone were known as the Clayr’s Glacier, as if they were all one.
Not that the Clayr chose rooms too close to the glacier as a rule. They had lived in the mountain for millennia, following the tunneling of the now almost extinct drill-grubs or carrying out their own magical or physical excavations. At the same time, the glacier had continued its inexorable march down the valley, and into the mountains that gripped its sides. Ice ground down and broke through stone, and the glacier was indifferent if that also meant crashing through the tunnels of the Clayr.
Of course, the Clayr could See where the glacier was going to have its unthinking way, but that hadn’t stopped various ambitious builders of bygone days. Obviously they had felt their extensions would last as long as they did, and probably for at least three or four generations after them—time enough to make the work worthwhile.
Lirael thought of all those builders and wondered why the Stair had been made with such uncomfortably high steps. But after a while, even mechanically counting steps couldn’t keep her imagination under rein. She started to imagine how
Annisele would be looking right at that instant. Perhaps she was standing at the children’s end of the Great Hall, a single figure in white amidst a field of blue. She would be staring down the other end, no doubt, barely aware of the ranks and ranks of white-clad Clayr, sitting in the pews that lined both sides of the Hall for several hundred yards, twenty-one ranks deep. Pews made from ancient dark mahogany, with silk cushions that were replaced every fifty years, with considerable ceremony.
At the far end of the Hall, there would be the Voice of the Nine Day Watch, and perhaps some of the Watchers too, their business permitting. They would be standing around the Charter Stone that rose up from the floor of the Hall, a single menhir swarming with all the glowing, changing marks of the Charter that described everything in the world, seen or unseen. And on the Charter Stone, higher than anyone could reach, save the Voice with her metal-tipped wand, there would be the circlet of the new Clayr, the silver and moonstones reflecting the Charter marks of the Stone.
Lirael forced her tired legs up another step. Annisele’s walk wouldn’t be tiring at all. Just a few hundred steps, with smiling faces on all sides. Then, when the circlet was placed on her head at last, the tumult as all the Clayr rose to their feet, followed by the great cheer that would echo through the Hall and beyond. The Awakening of Annisele, a true Clayr, a mistress of the Sight. Acclaimed by one and all.
Unlike Lirael, who was, as always, alone and unregarded. She felt like crying but brushed the tears away. Only another hundred steps to go, and she would be at the Starmount Gate. Once through the gate and across the wide terrace in front of it, Lirael would stand on the edge of the glacier, looking down into icy death.
Chapter Three
Paperwings
At the top of the Starmount Stair, Lirael rested for a while, till the chill coming through the stone got too much to bear. Then she donned her outdoor gear, turning the world green as she slipped on her goggles. Last, she drew a silk scarf from the pocket of her coat, tied it across her nose and mouth, and folded down the earflaps of her cap.
Dressed like that, she might be one of the Clayr. No one could see her face, hair, or eyes. She looked exactly like any other Clayr. When they found her body, they wouldn’t even know who it was till cap, scarf, and goggles were removed.
Lirael would look like one of the Clayr for the last time.
Even so, she hesitated before the door that led from the Stair to the Paperwing hangar and the Starmount Gate. It probably wasn’t too late to go back, to say she’d eaten something that disagreed with her so she’d had to stay in her room. If she hurried, she’d almost certainly be back before everyone returned from the Awakening.
But nothing would have changed. There was nothing to look forward to down there, Lirael decided, so she might as well go and look at the cliffs. She could make her final decision there.
She took her key out again, clumsy in her gloves, and unlocked the door. A visible one, this time, but magically guarded as well. Lirael felt the Charter Magic inside it flow out through the key, through the fur of her gloves and into her hands. She tensed for a moment, then relaxed as it ebbed away again. Whatever it guarded against, the spell wasn’t interested in her.
It was colder still past the door, though Lirael was still inside the mountain. This large chamber was the Paperwing hangar, where the Clayr kept their magical aircraft. Three of them slept nearby. They looked rather like slim canoes, with hawk-wings and tails. Lirael felt an urge to touch one of them, to see if it really did feel like paper, but she knew better than that. Physically, the Paperwings were made from thousands of sheets of laminated paper. But they were also made with considerable magic, and were partially sentient as a result. The painted eyes at the front of the closest green and silver craft might be dull now, but they would light up if she touched it. Lirael had no idea what it might do then. She knew the craft were controlled by whistled Charter marks, and she could whistle, but she didn’t know the marks or any special technique that might be required.
So Lirael crept past the Paperwings, across to the Starmount Gate. It was huge—big enough for thirty people or two Paperwings to pass abreast—and easily four times as tall as Lirael. Fortunately, she didn’t have to even try to open it, because there was a smaller sally port cut into the large Gate’s left quarter. A moment’s work with her key, the touch of the guarding spell, then the door was open, and Lirael stepped outside.
Cold and sunshine hit her at the same time, the former strong enough to feel even through her heavy clothes, and the latter fierce enough to make her half-close her eyes, even behind goggles.
It was a beautiful summer day. Lower down in the valley, below the glacier, it would be hot. Here it was cold, the chill mainly coming from the breeze that blew along the glacier and then up, over, and around the mountain.
Ahead of Lirael, a broad, unnaturally flat terrace was carved into the mountainside. It was about a hundred yards long and fifty yards wide, and snow and chunks of ice were piled up all around it in deep drifts. But the terrace itself had only a light dusting of snow. Lirael knew it was kept like that by Charter sendings—magically created servants who shoveled, raked, and repaired all the year round, oblivious to the weather. There were none to be seen now, but the Charter Magic that would send them into action lurked beneath the paving stones of the terrace.
On the far side of the terrace, the mountain fell away in a sheer precipice. Lirael looked across to it but saw nothing but blue sky and a few wisps of low cloud. She would have to cross the terrace and look down to see the main bulk of the glacier a thousand feet below. But she didn’t cross. Instead, she pictured what might happen if she jumped. If she threw herself out far enough, she would fall free, down to the waiting ice and a speedy end. If she fell short, she would hit a spur of rock maybe only thirty or forty feet down, then slide and tumble the rest of the way, breaking a new bone with every momentary impact.
Lirael shivered and looked away. Now that she was actually here, only a few minutes’ brisk walk from the precipice, she wasn’t sure that making her own death was such a good idea. But every time she tried to think of a continuing future for herself, she felt weak and blocked, as if all the ways forward were closed off by walls too high to climb.
For now, she forced herself to move and take a few steps across the terrace, to at least look at the drop. But her legs seemed to have a life of their own, walking her along the length of the terrace instead, without getting any closer to the cliff-side.
Half an hour later, she headed back to the Starmount Gate, having walked the length of the terrace four times without once daring to go anywhere near the cliff on the far side. The closest she’d got was the sudden drop at the end of the terrace, where the Paperwings actually took off. But that was a fall of only a few hundred feet, down a much less steep face of the mountain, and not onto the glacier. Even then she hadn’t gone within twenty feet of the edge.
Lirael wondered how the Paperwings would launch off that far end. She had never seen one take off or land, and she spent some time trying to imagine how it would look. Obviously, they would slip along the ice and then at some point leap into the sky, but where exactly? Did they need a long run-up like the blue pelicans she’d seen on the Ratterlin, or could they shoot straight up like falcons?
All these questions made Lirael curious about how the Paperwings actually worked. She was thinking of risking a closer look at one back in the hangar when she realized that the black speck she’d noticed high above wasn’t a product of her imagination, or a tiny storm cloud. It was a real Paperwing, and it was obviously coming in to land.
At the same time she heard the deep rumble of the Starmount Gate as it started to swing open. She looked back at it, then at the Paperwing again, her head moving in frantic starts. What was she going to do?
She could run across the terrace and throw herself off, but she really didn’t feel like doing that. The moment of her darkest despair had passed, at least for now.
She could
just stand on one side of the terrace and watch the Paperwing land, but that would almost certainly lead to a serious scolding from Aunt Kirrith, not to mention several months’ worth of extra kitchen duties. Or some even worse punishment she didn’t know about.
Or she could hide and watch. After all, she had wanted to see a Paperwing land.
All these options raced through her mind, and it took only an instant for the last one to be chosen. Lirael ran to a snowdrift, sat down in it, and started to drag snow across herself. Soon she was almost completely hidden, save for the line of footprints that led across the snow to her hiding place.
Quickly, Lirael visualized the Charter, then reached into its eternal flow to pull out the three marks she needed. One by one they grew into brilliance inside her mind, filling it until she could think of nothing else. She drew them into her mouth, then puffed the marks out towards her tracks in the snow.
The spell left her as a whirling ball of frosted breath that grew until it was an arm’s span wide. It drifted back across her path, sweeping her footsteps clean. Then, its work done, the ball let itself be taken by the wind, breath and Charter marks dissolving into nothing.
Lirael looked up, hoping whoever was in the Paperwing hadn’t seen the strange little cloud. The aircraft was closer now, the shadow of its wings passing along the terrace as it circled once more, losing height with every pass.
Lirael squinted, her sight obscured by goggles and the snow that covered nearly all her face. She couldn’t quite see who was in the Paperwing. It was a different color from the ones used by the Clayr. Red and gold, the colors of the Royal House. A messenger, perhaps? There was regular communication between the King in Belisaere and the Clayr, and Lirael had often seen messengers in the Lower Refectory. But they didn’t normally arrive by Paperwing.
