by Garth Nix
Inside the fiery wall, forms began to take shape, humanoid figures that flexed arms and legs within the flame. Charter marks roared and swam in the yellow-blue-red inferno, flowing too fast for Lirael to see what they were.
Then the figures stepped out of the flames, warriors composed entirely of fire, their swords white-hot and brilliant.
“Do something!” barked the Dog.
But Lirael just kept staring at the advancing warriors, mesmerized by the flames that flickered through their bodies. They were all part of one great Charter-spell, she saw, one enormously powerful sending made up of many parts. A guardian-sending, like the one on the red wood door . . .
Lirael stood up, patted the Dog once on the head, and walked out, straight towards the ferocious heat and the guardians with their swords of flame.
“I am Lirael,” she said, investing her speech with the Charter marks of truth and clarity. “A Daughter of the Clayr.”
Her words hung in the air for a moment, cutting through the buzz and crackle of the fiery sendings. Then the guardians raised their swords as if in salute—and a wave of even more intense heat rolled forward, robbing Lirael’s lungs of air. She choked, coughed, took one step back . . . and fainted.
When she came to, the Disreputable Dog’s tongue was just about to lick her face. For about the tenth time, judging from the thick film of dog saliva on her cheek.
“What happened?” she asked, quickly looking around. There were no fires now, no burning guardians, but small Charter marks for light twinkled all around her like tiny stars.
“They burnt up your air when they saluted. I think that whoever created those sendings expected people to identify themselves from the door,” said the Dog, attempting another lick, only to be fended off. “Or else they were particularly stupid sendings. Still, at least one of them had the good grace to throw out a handful of these little lights. Some of your hair has been burnt off, by the way.”
“Curse it!” exclaimed Lirael, examining the singed ends of her hair, where they stuck out from under her scarf. “Aunt Kirrith will notice that for sure! I’ll have to tell her I leant over a candle or something. Speaking of Kirrith, we’d better start back.”
“Not yet!” protested the Dog. “Not after all this effort. Besides, the lights mark a path. Look! That must be it. Lirael’s Path!”
Lirael sat up and looked where the Dog was pointing—in the classic pose, one foreleg up and snout eagerly forward. Sure enough, there was a path of tiny, twinkling Charter lights, leading farther along the ledge, to where the Rift narrowed into an even more ominous darkness.
“We really should go back,” she said, half-heartedly. The path of lights was there, beckoning. The sendings had let her past. There must be something at the other end worth getting to. Maybe even something that would help her gain the gift of Sight, she thought, helpless against that longing, the tiny hope that still lived inside her heart. All her years of searching in the Library had not helped her. Perhaps it would be otherwise, here in the ancient heart of the Clayr’s realm.
“Come on, then,” she said, pushing herself up with a groan. Burnt hair and bruises—that was all she’d found so far. “What are you waiting for?”
“You go first,” retorted the Dog. “My nose still hurts from your stupid relatives’ blazing doormen.”
The path of lights led farther along the ledge, and the Rift narrowed, the rock walls closing in, till Lirael could reach out and run her fingers along the cold, wet stone on either side of her. She stopped doing that when she discovered that the luminescence came from a damp fungus that made her fingertips glow and smell like rotten cabbage.
As the way grew narrower, it also descended farther into the mountain, and a chill dankness banished the last remnants of heat from Lirael’s scorched face. There was also a sound, a deep rumbling that vibrated up through her feet, getting louder as they walked on. At first, Lirael thought she was imagining it, that perhaps it was part of what the Dog called her sense of Death. Then she realized what it was: the full-throated roar of rushing water.
“We must be near an underground river or something,” she said, nervously raising her voice to counter the rising roar of the water. Like most of the Clayr, she could barely swim, and her experience of rivers was confined to the awesome ice-melt torrents that raged from the glacier every Spring.
“We are almost upon it,” replied the Dog, who could see farther in the glow of the star-lined path. “As the poet had it:
“Swift river born in deepest night,
Rushing forth to catch the light.
Deep ice and dark its swaddling cloth,
The Kingdom’s foes will feel its wroth.
Till mighty Ratterlin spends its strength,
In the Delta at full length.
“Hmmm . . . I may have forgotten a line there. Let’s see, ‘Swift river—’ ”
“The Ratterlin’s source is here?” interrupted Lirael, pointing ahead. “I thought it was just meltwater. I didn’t know it had a source.”
“There is a spring,” replied the Dog, after a pause. “A very old spring. In the heart of the mountain, in the deepest dark. Stop!”
Lirael obeyed, one hand instinctively clutching at the loose fold of skin on the Dog’s neck, just behind her collar.
At first she didn’t understand why the Dog had stopped her, till the hound led her on, a few more cautious steps. With those steps, the sound of the river suddenly became a thundering roar, and cold spray slapped her in the face.
They had come to the river. The path ahead was a slender, slippery bridge of wet stone that stretched out twenty paces or more, to end in yet another door. The bridge had no rails, and was less than two feet wide. Its narrowness, and the rushing water below, were a clear indication that it was designed to be a barrier to the Dead. Nothing of that kind could cross here.
Lirael looked at the bridge, the door, then down at the dark, rushing water, feeling both fear and a terrible fascination. The constant motion of the water and the incessant roar were mesmerizing, but finally she managed to tear her gaze away. She looked at the Dog, and though her words were half-drowned by the crash of the river, exclaimed, “I am not going to cross that!”
The Dog ignored her, and Lirael started to repeat herself. But the words stayed on her tongue as Lirael saw that the Dog’s paws had grown twice as large as usual, and flattened out. She also looked quite smug.
“I bet you’ve even grown suckers,” shouted Lirael, shuddering with distaste at the thought. “Like an octopus.”
“Of course I have,” the Dog shouted back, lifting one paw with a squelching pop that Lirael could hear even over the river’s roar. “This looks like a very treacherous bridge.”
“Yes, it does,” bawled Lirael, looking at the bridge again. Clearly the Dog intended to cross, and with her sucker-footed help, Lirael guessed, crossing would go from impossible to merely dangerous. Sighing, she bent down and took off her shoes, eyes blinking against the constant spray. After tying the laces of her soft leather ankle-boots through her belt, she wriggled her toes on the stone. It was very cold, but Lirael was relieved to feel faint cross-hatching that she hadn’t seen in the dim light. That would give her some grip.
“I wonder what this bridge was designed to keep out,” she said, carefully slipping her fingers under the Dog’s collar, feeling the comforting buzz of the Charter Magic there and the even more comforting bulk of a well-balanced dog.
They had only taken the first step when Lirael voiced her second thought, her words inaudible with the river’s bellow all around them.
“Or what it was designed to keep in.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Power of Three
The door at the far end of the bridge opened as soon as Lirael touched it. Once again, she felt Charter Magic flow into her, but it was not the friendly touch of the upper door, or the quiet recognition of the stone portal at the entrance to the Rift. This one was more like a wary examination, followed b
y immediate, but not necessarily friendly, recognition.
Under her hand, the Dog shivered as the door swung open. Lirael felt the tremor and wondered why, till she caught the distinctive, corrosive scent of Free Magic. It was coming from somewhere ahead, strangely overlaid with Charter Magic that bound and contained it.
“Free Magic,” whispered Lirael, hesitating. But the Dog continued to move forward, dragging her along. Reluctantly, Lirael followed her through the doorway.
As soon as Lirael passed the threshold, the door slammed shut behind her. In an instant, the roar of the river was cut off. So was the light from the Charter-marked trail. It was dark, darker than any darkness Lirael had ever known, a true dark in which it was suddenly difficult to even imagine light. The darkness pressed upon Lirael, making her doubt her own senses. Only the Dog’s warm skin under her hand told her that she was still standing, that the room had not changed, and the floor had not tilted.
“Don’t move,” whispered the Dog, and Lirael felt a canine snout briefly press against her leg, as if the spoken warning weren’t enough.
The smell of Free Magic grew stronger. Lirael pinched her nose with one hand, trying not to breathe anything in, while her other hand went to the clockwork emergency mouse in her waistcoat pocket. Not that it was likely that even this clever device could find its way from here to the Library.
She could feel Charter Magic building, too, strong marks floating in the air like pollen, their usual internal light dampened. She could sense Charter and Free Magic working together, winding and twisting about her, weaving some spell she couldn’t even begin to identify.
Fear began to knot in Lirael’s stomach, slowly spreading to paralyze her lungs. She wanted to breathe, to force air slowly in and out, to calm herself with the steadiness of her own breath. But the air was heavy with strange magic, magic she could not—would not—breathe in.
Then lights began to sparkle in the air; tiny, fragile balls of light made up of hundreds of hair-thin spines, like luminous dandelion clocks, wafting about on some breeze Lirael couldn’t feel. With the lights, the taint of Free Magic abated, the Charter Magic began to strengthen, and Lirael took a slight, cautious breath.
In the strangely mottled, constantly changing light, Lirael saw that she was in an octagonal chamber. A large room, but not of cold, carved stone as she’d expected, here in the heart of the mountain. The walls were tiled in a delicate pattern of golden stars, towers, and silver keys. The ceiling was plastered and painted with a night sky, full of black, rain-fat clouds advancing upon seven bright and shining stars. And there was carpet under her bare feet, Lirael realized. A deep blue carpet, soft and warm under her toes after the cold, wet stone of the bridge.
In the middle of the room, a redwood table stood in solitary splendor, its slender legs ending in silver, three-toed feet. On its rich, polished surface there were three items, arranged in a line: a small metal case about the size of Lirael’s palm; a set of what looked like metal panpipes; and a book, bound in deep blue leather with silver clasps. The table, or the items on it, were clearly the focal point for the magic, for the dandelion lights swarmed thickest there, creating an effect like luminous fog.
“Off you go, then,” said the Dog, sitting back on her haunches. “That looks like what we’ve come for.”
“What do you mean?” asked Lirael suspiciously, drawing a series of deep and calming breaths. She felt reasonably safe now, but there was a lot of magic in the room that she didn’t know, and she couldn’t even begin to guess what it was for or where it came from. And she could still taste Free Magic at the back of her mouth and on her tongue, a cold iron tang that just wouldn’t go away.
“The doors opened for you; the path lit up for you; the guardians here didn’t destroy you,” said the Dog, nuzzling Lirael’s open hand with her cold, damp nose. She looked up at Lirael knowingly and added, “Whatever’s on that table must be meant for you. Which equally means it’s not meant for me. So I’m going to sit down here. Or lie down, actually. Wake me up when it’s time to go.”
With that, the Dog stretched luxuriously, yawned, and lowered herself to the carpet. Comfortably settled on her side, she swished her tail a few times and then, to all appearances, fell deeply asleep.
“Oh, Dog!” exclaimed Lirael. “You can’t sleep now! What’ll I do if something bad happens?”
The Dog opened one eye and said, with the least possible jaw movement, “Wake me up, of course.”
Lirael looked down at the sleeping Dog, then over at the table. The Stilken was the worst thing she’d encountered in the Library. But she’d found other dangerous things over the past few years—fell creatures, old Charter-spells that had unraveled or become unpredictable, mechanical traps, even poisoned book bindings. All these were the regular hazards of a librarian’s life, but nothing like what she faced now. Whatever these items were, they were guarded more heavily, and with stranger and more powerful magic, than anything Lirael had ever seen.
Whatever magic was concentrated here was very old, too, Lirael realized. The walls, the floor, the ceiling, the carpet, the table—even the air in the room—were saturated with layer upon layer of Charter marks, some of them at least a thousand years old. She could feel them moving everywhere, mixing and changing. When she closed her eyes for a moment, the room felt almost like a Charter Stone, a source of Charter Magic rather than just a place upon which many spells had been cast.
But that was impossible, at least as far as she knew. . . .
Suddenly made dizzy by the thought, Lirael opened her eyes again. Charter marks flowed against her skin, into her breath, swam in her blood. Free Magic floated between the marks. The dandelion lights spread out towards her like tendrils, wrapped gently around her waist, and slowly reeled her in towards the table.
The magic and the lights made her feel light-headed and dazed, as if she’d woken from the final moments of a dream. Lirael fought the feeling for a moment, but it was a pleasant feeling, not at all threatening. She let the sleeping Dog lie and walked forward slowly, swathed in light.
Then she was suddenly at the table, with no memory of crossing the intervening space. Her hands were resting on the cool, polished surface of the table. As could be expected of a Second Assistant Librarian, she reached for the book first, her fingers touching the silver clasp that held it shut as she read the title embossed in silver type upon the spine: The Book of Remembrance and Forgetting.
Lirael undid the clasp, feeling Charter Magic there, too, noting the marks that chased each other across the silver surface and deep in the metal itself. Marks of binding and closing, burning and destruction.
But the clasp was open by the time she realized what the marks were, and she stood unharmed. Carefully, she turned back the cover and the title page, the crisp, leaf-thin paper turning easily. There were Charter marks inside the pages, put there at the time of the paper’s making. And Free Magic, constrained and channeled into place. Magic of both kinds lay in the boards and leather of the cover, and even in the glue and stitching of the spine.
Most of all, there was magic and power in the type. In the past, Lirael had seen similar, if less powerful, books, like In the Skin of a Lyon. You could never truly finish reading such a book, for the contents changed at need, at the original maker’s whim, or to suit the phases of the moon or the patterns of the weather. Some of the books had contents you couldn’t even remember till certain events might come to pass. Invariably, this was an act of kindness from the creator of the book, for such contents invariably dealt with things that would be a burden to recall with every waking day.
The lights danced around Lirael’s head as she began to read, making shadow patterns from her hair flicker across the page. She read the first page, then the next, then the one after. Soon Lirael had finished the first chapter, as her hand reached out every few minutes to turn the page. Behind her, the Dog’s heavy, sleepy breath seemed to match the slow rhythm of the turning pages.
Hours later, or ev
en days—for Lirael had lost all knowledge of time—she turned what seemed to be the last page and closed the book. It latched itself shut, the silver clasp snapping.
Lirael drew back at the snap but didn’t leave the table. Instead, she picked up the panpipes, seven small tubes of silver, ranging in size from the length of her little finger to a little shorter than her hand. She held the pipes up to her lips, but didn’t blow. They were much more than they appeared. The book had told her how the pipes were made, and how they should be used, and Lirael now knew that the Charter marks that moved in the silver were only a veneer on the Free Magic that lurked within.
She touched each of the pipes in turn, smallest to largest, and whispered their names to herself before putting the instrument back on the table. Then she picked up the last item, the small metal case. This was silver, too, etched with pleasing decorations as well as Charter marks. The latter were similar to those on the book, all threatening retribution if the box were opened by someone not of the True Blood. It didn’t say which particular blood, but Lirael thought that if the book opened for her, the case would, too.
She lightly touched the catch, recoiling a little as she felt the heat of Free Magic blazing within. The case remained shut. Briefly, she thought that the book might be wrong, or she might have misread the marks, or not have the right blood. She shut her eyes and firmly pressed the catch.
Nothing terrible happened, but the case shivered in her hand. Lirael opened her eyes. The case had sprung open into two halves, hinged in the middle. Like a small mirror, to be balanced on a shelf or table.
Lirael opened it completely and placed it, vee-shaped, on the table. One side of it was silver, but the other was something she couldn’t describe. Where the bright reflective surface of a mirror would be, there was a nonreflective rectangle of . . . nothing. A piece of absolute darkness, a shape of something made from the total absence of light.
