by Nix, Garth
“Best to expect the worst,” said the young man. “I need you to build a bonfire on the other side—if you can in this drizzle—and have torches ready. Does anyone here have the mark?”
Ham and Mrs. Watkins looked at Elinor, at her forehead. She flinched back as if struck and instinctively reached up to pull her scarf tighter.
“What are you—”
“The Charter mark,” replied the young man impatiently. He pulled his cap off and pointed to his own forehead. There, in exactly the same place as Elinor’s unsightly blemish, he had the identical, shameful brand. Only his mark was shining faintly, a soft silver under the drizzling rain, bright above his dark eyes.
Elinor heard a strange choking sound. It took her a moment to realize she was the one making it. Her legs did give way after all, and she had to grab one of the hooks on the wall coatrack to stop herself falling down.
“Untaught, I take it, and thus useless,” said the man. He bulled past her, swept the dusty silver tray meant to receive visitors’ cards off the card table, laid down his case, and with swift, well-trained movements unclasped the straps, opened it, and drew out a sword.
Not just any sword. The slender steel blade shone with light from illuminated symbols that moved and swirled within the metal, symbols that Elinor instinctively felt were akin to the mark on her forehead, the same mark that was on this strange visitor’s head.
It had to be magic, magic from the North.
As Elinor gawped, he reached inside his coat with his left hand and pulled out a set of panpipes. Seven tubes of silvered steel, the shortest the length of his little finger, the longest twice that, joined together by two crossbars of bronze. The metal of the pipes also shone, bright symbols crawling across steel and bronze.
“I left my bells at the fort,” he said with a confidential air. “So as to look more unprepared. For whoever has set this little trap in motion.”
“What?” asked Elinor weakly. What did bells have to do with anything? Or panpipes, for that matter? Unprepared? Trap? And his forehead mark . . .
“Your mother’s upstairs? Or what purports to be her?”
“Purports to be . . .”
“Show me,” said the man. He looked at Mrs. Watkins. “You’d best get everyone else out, help Ham with the fire. He told me you’re both from north of Bain. You remember the rhyme?”
Mrs. Watkins bobbed a curtsy and surprised Elinor very much by singing in a little-girl voice:
When the Dead do walk, seek water’s run
For this the Dead will always shun
Swift river’s best or broadest lake
To ward the Dead and haven make
If water fails thee, fire’s thy friend
If neither guards, it will be thy end.
She was singing to the tune that Elinor had always known as “When Little Lambs Do Lap the Dew,” but these words were entirely different.
“What are you going on about, Mrs. Watkins?” asked Elinor. “Who is this man? And I am definitely not letting you go up to Mother.”
“He’s the Abhorsen,” said Mrs. Watkins. “He must be. Oh, Elinor, we should have told you—”
“A great many things, from the sound of it,” snapped the young man. “And I’m not the Abhorsen. That’s my great-aunt Tizanael. I’m the Abhorsen-in-Waiting. Terciel, at your service, Charter help me. Now, the wind is coming from the North, it’s clearly been summoned to do so, the day is dark and getting darker, and there is no time to waste. Where is your mother, Elinor?”
“She is upstairs, in bed,” replied Elinor stiffly. She made one last effort to return this situation to something approaching normality. “I . . . I fail to see how this concerns you.”
“It does, however,” said Terciel. “Because I do not think it is your mother upstairs, not anymore. There is something Dead there. Perhaps not entirely present in Life as yet, but it waits upon the threshold. I know it is there, it knows I am here, and the longer I do nothing, the greater the danger. Will you let me past?”
Elinor hesitated for a fraction of a second, trying to make sense of all this strangeness. But there was no sense to be made, save that there was something seriously wrong with her mother and instinctively she knew Terciel was somehow the right person to deal with it, just as Ham was the right person when a horse was injured, or Mrs. Watkins when a dress was torn apparently beyond repair.
She stepped aside. Instantly, Terciel was off up the stairs, his shining sword held high.
“Wait!” shrieked Elinor, and ran after him. Ham and Mrs. Watkins ran the other way, obedient to Terciel’s instructions.
At the top of the stairs, Terciel slowed down and looked back at Elinor.
“Is there someone else up here?”
“Mother’s maid, Maria,” said Elinor. “Shall I call her out?”
She started forward, but Terciel pulled her back.
“No,” he whispered. “It’s too late.”
“What do you mean it’s too late?” Elinor whispered back, her face close to his. She felt an almost overpowering urge to touch the mark on his forehead. It was even brighter now, as if it were made of some copper-tinged golden fire, and she wondered if her own dull scar could ever be like that.
“I’m sorry,” whispered Terciel. “I’d have saved her if I could.”
“Saved her from—”
A terrible scream issued from inside Amelia Hallett’s room. The most awful scream Elinor had ever heard, made worse because it was recognizably from Maria, clearly terrified beyond reason, or in awful pain, or both.
The scream suddenly stopped, cut off at its height. The door to Amelia’s bedroom flew open, and a thick, low blanket of fog slowly began to roll out across the floor. Accompanying it, there was a horrible, breathy, stick-cracking cackling noise that Elinor doubted could come from any human mouth.
“Too late,” whispered Terciel. “Run. Run!”
He lifted the panpipes to his mouth and blew upon the second-longest tube, the sixth in line. Elinor had half turned to flee, instinctively obeying the determination and fear in Terciel’s voice. But the sound of the pipe caught her, stopping her in place. It was not a single note, but a choir of notes that blended into one, the sound overcoming all others so she could hear nothing else, and somehow mixed in with this unearthly sound she felt rather than heard Terciel commanding her to stop where she was, to stand still.
“Not you!” shouted Terciel to Elinor. He looked back at her and then swiftly to the bedroom door again. Elinor followed his gaze and saw her mother appear in the doorway. At least, for the briefest moment, she thought it was her mother. It was a human form of the right height, in her mother’s heliotrope nightgown, with her mother’s dyed-auburn hair, but the hair hung lank on a face where the flesh had caved in upon the skull, and where her mother’s eyes should be there were sockets of flame, and black smoke coiled up where there should be eyebrows.
“Stop!” commanded Terciel again, and he blew upon the sixth pipe once more. Elinor felt the sound of it in her bones, but this time she did not feel its compulsion, and knew its dominating power was not directed at her but at the monster who wore her mother’s flesh.
The thing that was not Amelia Hallett shuddered, but it did not stop. It took a step forward. Silver sparks suddenly burst up around its feet, eating at the decayed flesh to show the bone beneath, but still it took another step, and then another. Its jaw dropped, lower than should be possible, revealing a flickering red fire within its mouth and throat to match its eyes, and once again it cackled, the horrible, clack-clack cackle, cutting through the sound of the pipe as no other sound had done.
Terciel reeled backward, into Elinor. He stumbled, obviously not expecting her to still be there. She caught him, feeling his muscles flex as he stopped the instant half turn and sword stroke that he’d instinctively been about to do.
“Go!” he shouted, grabbing her and accelerating into a sprint for the stair. “It’s too strong here! We have to get out!”
Elinor ran, as much from fear of what she’d seen as from Terciel’s urging.
At the base of the stairs, Terciel turned and lifted his sword, sketching out a symbol in the air. As the sword point moved, it left a trail of bright golden fire that persisted in the air. Elinor instinctively knew this was another mark akin to the brand she bore, she could feel the skin on her forehead tingle, as if in response.
The creature who wore her mother’s body slowly came down the stairs, one step at a time. Its legs were now little more than bone, with strips of hanging flesh. But there were no more silver sparks and it was moving faster.
The golden mark Terciel had drawn in the air had started no larger than a single handspan, but it was growing larger, and Elinor saw there were other marks within the big one, like an illusory painting where you couldn’t see the dots unless you were up close.
Terciel turned again, thrust the panpipes into his pocket, and grabbed her hand, dragging her along the gallery.
“Sorry about the house!” he gasped.
“What!”
He let go of her as they staggered out into the drizzle. Elinor turned to look back through the open door and saw the creature in her mother’s body step down into the golden marks Terciel had drawn, a shining pattern that had spread to be several feet in diameter. As the thing touched it, there was an explosion of golden light, like sunshine suddenly bursting through heavy cloud. But there was no accompanying blast of air as in a real explosion. Elinor flinched back, blinded, and felt Terciel take her hand again.
“Sorry again! Should have warned you. Come on.”
Elinor blinked furiously as he dragged her away, her sight returning but marred by drifting black blobs. A sudden waft of smoke hit her nostrils, and the edges of her blurred vision filled with flickering red and orange light.
The house was on fire. Elinor halted, resisting Terciel’s attempts to move her.
“The fire won’t stop it,” said Terciel urgently, pulling on her hand. “Only slow it down. We have to get to the ghyll.”
Elinor stopped resisting Terciel and ran with him, around the house and through the courtyard to where the old kitchen garden had been, taking the path from the fallen gate on the far side that led through the bare field up the hillside toward the ghyll.
“I’d hoped it would be something less powerful,” panted Terciel as they ran together. He glanced over his shoulder, tripped, and would have fallen if Elinor hadn’t grabbed his elbow. She was glad she was on the opposite side from his sword, which had wavered in his hand as he fell.
“Thanks.”
The ghyll cut its way down from much higher up the hill above Coldhallow. Up there it was a twenty- or thirty-foot-deep ravine with the stream rushing through in a series of small waterfalls, here it was a lesser cut, and lower down in the home field it was a steep-sided creek, currently well-lined with a great snarl of blackberry vines, which in the past would have been removed by the farmworkers. Within half a mile it reached flatter country and broadened, the water slowing to a sleepy, steady flow.
Elinor spotted Ham and Mrs. Watkins where a fallen tree had long ago been laboriously dragged down from the copse higher up the hill and laid across the ghyll to form a makeshift bridge. Ham had made a bonfire of garden stakes and sticks gathered from the edge of the copse and he was trying to light it, without noticeable success. The drizzle didn’t seem heavy enough to stop this fire, but it had been going most of the night, so the fuel they’d gathered was wetter than it looked.
Terciel ran nimbly across the log, with Elinor close behind.
“Stand back,” said Terciel. As Ham and Mrs. Watkins scrambled away, he spoke a word, or perhaps mouthed it. Elinor wasn’t sure if she heard anything or not. A glowing symbol sped from his mouth as if he’d spat it, flew through the air, hit the piled-up sticks, and the whole thing caught alight in an instant. It was a healthy yellow-red fire that had none of the awfulness of the flames in the Dead creature’s eyes and throat.
“What’s happened to my mother?” demanded Elinor. “And what was that thing . . . that thing that looked like her?”
“Your mother has lingered on the very border between Life and Death for weeks,” said Terciel shortly. He looked up and down the ghyll, and then up the hillside behind them. It was darker still under the trees. The copse, like the other parts of the Coldhallow estate, had not been looked after, and the trees grew close and thick. “She was not allowed to properly die by the entity that is currently using her body. I would say she entered into an agreement she didn’t understand or more likely didn’t believe. It couldn’t have happened any other way, not here, so far from the Wall.”
“An agreement?”
“To arrange a situation to lure me here,” said Terciel. “Did she suddenly come into money recently?”
“No, quite the reverse!” snapped Elinor.
“Gold, probably,” said Terciel. “From the Old Kingdom. I suppose you wouldn’t have known about it.”
“I would!” protested Elinor. But she could feel the weight of the two strange coins in her jacket pocket. She remembered all those empty velvet bags in the drawer and the line in the solicitor’s letter about “the unexpected remittance in gold.”
“It doesn’t matter now,” said Terciel. “For her, anyway.”
“To lure you here . . .” muttered Mrs. Watkins nervously. “But I thought it must be Elinor’s grandmother who made me send the telegram.”
“No compulsion could hold that long. It must have been someone much more recent, I fear, though they’ve made you forget,” said Terciel. “Have you had any strange visitors?”
“No,” said Mrs. Watkins and Elinor together. But Ham frowned and shook his head.
“There was the man brought your wool from the post office three weeks back, instead of Mrs. Killick,” he said slowly. “But I only saw him going away down the road. Scraggly and bald.”
“What are you talking about?” asked Mrs. Watkins. “Mrs. Killock brought my wool as usual. I remember . . . I remember . . .”
She shut her eyes and stood completely still, evidently not remembering.
“There you have it,” said Terciel. A raindrop blew against his forehead and slid into his eye, making him blink. “Is there any other way to cross the ghyll close by?”
“Not afore the flat,” said Ham. “Matter of a mile or so. But it’s not so deep cut from here. You could climb down and wade across.”
“The Dead won’t cross fast running water,” said Terciel. “They don’t like rain, either, it’s uncomfortable for them. Though this drizzle hardly counts as rain.”
“So we’re safe here?” asked Mrs. Watkins.
“Safer than over there,” replied Terciel, which did not comfort the others at all.
“Where’s Cook?” asked Elinor suddenly.
“She wouldn’t leave her kitchen,” replied Mrs. Watkins very slowly. “You know what she’s like.”
They all looked at the burning house.
“There’ll be no stopping that fire with the wind up,” said Ham. The wind wasn’t that fierce where they were standing, but the house was less protected, and it was well ablaze. “Not that the brigade from Cornbridge will be in any hurry to come. Not with the wind as it is.”
“The wind from the North,” said Elinor. “Though no one will tell me why that’s important.”
“It brings magic with it from the Old Kingdom,” said Terciel. “Free and Charter Magic.”
Elinor wanted to ask him what on earth that meant, but he wasn’t looking at her. He was gazing back across the ghyll to the field. Though there wasn’t much rain, the clouds were very dark and low, slowly scudding southward above them but never moving apart enough to create a gap. There was no hint of the sun, and the dull, diffused daylight was augmented by the red glow of the burning house. That glow was steadily getting brighter as the fire spread, and a vast plume of deep black smoke was rising above it to join with the low white cloud.
Elinor saw som
ething come out of the garden gate. Not her dead mother, or whatever animated her. This was something else. Her eyes couldn’t make sense of it for a moment or two, before she realized it was or had been a human, but it was so twisted and bent it was barely recognizable. It scuttled on all fours, and one arm was cut off at the elbow. It was not clothed, but its flesh or whatever passed for flesh was cracked and broken like dried mud and split wide enough to show white bone beneath, which glinted red in the light from the burning house.
Another Dead Hand came out of the garden gate and joined the first. This one was mostly intact, but it had a corroded sword through its middle, which it was trying to pull out and wield, but the blade was too well lodged in its rib cage. Both Hands moved out slowly, as if uncertain of their way, or unused to movement. The spirits that animated the decayed flesh had long been absent from Life.
More Dead came behind the first two, a lot more. Dozens and dozens of them, moving aimlessly at first, before in answer to some command inaudible to Elinor they spread out into a rough line by the garden wall. Most were obviously bog creatures, but there were some so malformed it was hard to discern whether their original forms had been humans or animals, or something in between.
“It is making Dead Hands already,” said Terciel. “In quantity. There must be a graveyard close by. Which isn’t on the map I borrowed.”
“There’s no graveyard that I know of, sir,” said Ham. He had a dagger in his hand now. Not one of his normal throwing knives. This one looked very sharp. “Closest is the village cemetery at Korbeck, and that’s three miles away.”
Elinor and Mrs. Watkins exchanged a fearful glance, the older woman leaving it to Elinor to explain.
“We studied the local history for a term when I was fourteen,” said Elinor. “There are some references to a battle here, in ancient days, between the tribe of the Baineri and the Parrell. The dead of both sides were supposedly buried somewhere between the house and the village.”
“In a bog, I would say,” said Terciel professionally. “They’re very well-preserved.”
“We’re safe from them here,” said Elinor nervously. “Aren’t we? You said they can’t cross running water.”
