by Garth Nix
Doubtless there were many other books that would be useful, Sabriel thought, but she still felt too tired and shaky to get more down. She planned to talk to Mogget, then study for an hour or two, before going back to bed. Even four or five waking hours seemed too much after her ordeal, and the loss of consciousness involved in sleep suddenly seemed very appealing.
Mogget, as if he had heard Sabriel thinking of him, appeared at the top of the steps and sauntered over to sprawl on a well-upholstered footstand.
“I see you have found that book,” he said, tail flicking backwards and forwards as he spoke. “Take care you do not read too much.”
“I’ve already read it all, anyway,” replied Sabriel, shortly.
“Perhaps,” remarked the cat. “But it isn’t always the same book. Like me, it is several things, not one.”
Sabriel shrugged, as if to show that she knew all about the book. But that was just bravado—the inner Sabriel was afraid of The Book of the Dead. She had worked her way through every chapter, under her father’s direction, but her normally excellent memory held only selected pages of this tome. If it changed its contents as well—she suppressed a shiver, and told herself that she knew all that was necessary.
“My first step must be to find my father’s body,” she said. “Which is where I need your help, Mogget.”
“I have no knowledge of where he met his end,” Mogget stated, with finality. He yawned, and started licking his paws.
Sabriel frowned, and found herself pulling in her lips, a characteristic she had deplored in the unpopular history teacher at school, who often went “thin-lipped” in anger or exasperation.
“Just tell me when you last saw him, and what his plans were.”
“Why don’t you read his diary,” suggested Mogget, in a momentary break from cleaning himself.
“Where is it?” asked Sabriel, excited. A diary would be tremendously helpful.
“He probably took it with him,” replied Mogget. “I haven’t seen it.”
“I thought you had to help me!” Sabriel said, another frown wrinkling across her forehead, reinforcing the thin lips. “Please answer my question.”
“Three weeks ago,” Mogget mumbled, mouth half muffled in the fur of his stomach, pink tongue alternating between words and cleansing. “A messenger came from Belisaere, begging for his help. Something Dead, something that could pass the wards, was preying on them. Abhorsen—I mean the previous Abhorsen, ma’am—suspected that there was more to it than that, Belisaere being Belisaere. But he went.”
“Belisaere. The name’s familiar—it’s a town?”
“A city. The capital. At least it was, when there was still a kingdom.”
“Was?”
Mogget stopped washing, and looked across, eyes narrowing to frowning slits. “What did they teach you in that school? There hasn’t been a King or Queen for two hundred years, and not even a Regent for twenty. That’s why the Kingdom sinks day by day, into a darkness from which no one will rise . . .”
“The Charter—” Sabriel began, but Mogget interrupted with a yowl of derision.
“The Charter crumbles too,” he mewed. “Without a ruler, Charter Stones broken one by one with blood, one of the Great Charters twi . . . twis . . . twisted—”
“What do you mean, one of the Great Charters?” Sabriel interrupted in turn. She had never heard of such a thing. Not for the first time, she also wondered what she’d been taught in school, and why her father had kept so quiet about the state of the Old Kingdom.
But Mogget was silent, as if the things he’d already said had stopped his mouth. For a moment, he seemed to be trying to form words, but nothing came from his small red mouth. Finally, he gave up. “I cannot tell you. It’s part of my binding, curse it! Suffice to say that the whole world slides into evil, and many are helping the slide.”
“And others resist it,” said Sabriel. “Like my father. Like me.”
“It depends what you do,” Mogget said, as if he doubted that someone as patently useless as Sabriel would make much difference. “Not that I care—”
The sound of the trapdoor opening above their heads stopped the cat in mid-speech. Sabriel tensed, looking up to see what was coming down the ladder, then started breathing again as she realized that it was only another Charter sending, its black habit flopping over the rungs of the ladder as it came down. This one, like the guards on the cliff corridor—but unlike the other House servants—had the silver key emblazoned on its chest and back. It bowed to Sabriel, and pointed up.
With a feeling of foreboding, Sabriel knew that it wanted her to look at something from the observatory. Reluctantly, she pushed her chair back and went over to the ladder. A cold draft was blowing in through the open trapdoor, carrying with it the chill of ice from further up the river. Sabriel shivered, as her hands touched the cold metal rungs.
Emerging into the observatory, the chill passed, for the room was still lit by the last, red light of the setting sun, giving an illusion of warmth and making Sabriel squint. She had no memory of this room, so it was with delight that she saw that it was totally walled in glass, or something like it. The bare beams of the red-tiled roof rested on transparent walls, so cleverly morticed together that the roof was like a work of art, complete with the slight draft that reduced its perfection to a more human level.
A large telescope of gleaming glass and bronze dominated the observatory, standing triumphant on a tripod of dark wood and darker iron. A tall observer’s stool stood next to it, and a lectern, a star chart still spilled across it. A thick, toe wriggle-inviting carpet lay under all, a carpet that was also a map of the heavens, showing many different, colorful constellations and whirling planets, woven in thick, richly dyed wool.
The sending, who had followed Sabriel, went to the south wall and pointed out towards the southern riverbank, its pallid, Charter-drawn hand indicating the very spot where Sabriel had emerged after her underground flight from the Mordicant.
Sabriel looked there, shielding her right eye from the west-falling sun. Her gaze crossed the white tops of the river and was drawn to the ledge, despite an inner quailing about what she would see.
As she feared, the Mordicant was still there. But with what she had come to think of as her Death sight, Sabriel sensed it was quiescent, temporarily just an unpleasant statue, a foreground to other, more active shapes that bustled about in some activity behind.
Sabriel stared a little longer, then went to the telescope, narrowly avoiding Mogget, who had somehow appeared underfoot. Sabriel wondered how he had got up the ladder, then dismissed the thought as she concentrated on what was happening outside.
Unaided, she hadn’t been certain what the shapes around the Mordicant were, but they sprang sharply at her through the telescope, drawn so close she felt she could somehow lean forward and snatch them away.
They were men and women—living, breathing people. Each was shackled to a partner’s leg by an iron chain and they shuffled about in these pairs under the dominating presence of the Mordicant. There were scores of them, coming out of the corridor, carrying heavily laden leather buckets or lengths of timber, taking them across the ledge and down the steps to the river. Then they filed back again, buckets empty, timber left behind.
Sabriel depressed the telescope a little, and almost growled in exasperation and anger as she saw the scene by the river. More living slaves were hammering long boxes together from the timber, and these boxes were being filled with earth from the buckets. As each box was filled, it was pushed out to bridge the gap from shore to stepping-stone and locked in place by slaves hammering iron spikes into the stone.
This particular part of the operation was being directed by something that lurked well back from the river, halfway up the steps. A man-shaped blot of blackest night, a moving silhouette. A necromancer’s Shadow Hand, or some free-willed Dead spirit that scorned the use of a body.
As Sabriel watched, the last of four boxes was thrust out to the first stepping-stone, spiked i
n place, and then chained to its three adjacent fellows. One slave, fastening the chain, overbalanced and went headfirst into the water, his shackle-mate following a second later. Their screams, if any, were drowned by the roar of the waterfall as its waters took their bodies. A few seconds later, Sabriel felt their lives snuffed out.
The other slaves at the river’s edge stopped working for a moment, either shocked at the sudden loss, or momentarily made more afraid of the river than their masters. But the Shadow Hand on the steps moved towards them, its legs like treacle, pouring down the slope, lapping over each step in turn. It gestured for some of the nearer slaves to walk across the earth-filled boxes to the stepping-stone. They did so, to cluster unhappily amid the spray.
The Shadow Hand hesitated then, but the Mordicant on the ledge above seemed to stir and rock forward a little, so the shadowy abomination gingerly trod on the boxes—and walked across to the stepping-stone, taking no scathe from the running water.
“Grave dirt,” commented Mogget, who obviously didn’t need the telescope. “Carted up by the villagers from Qyrre and Roble’s Town. I wonder if they’ve got enough to cross all the stones.”
“Grave dirt,” commented Sabriel bleakly, watching a fresh round of slaves arriving with buckets and more timber. “I had forgotten it could negate the running water. I thought . . . I thought I would be safe here, for a time.”
“Well, you are,” said Mogget. “It’ll take at least until tomorrow evening before their bridge is complete, particularly allowing for a couple of hours off around noon, when the Dead will have to hide if it isn’t overcast. But this shows planning, and that means a leader. Still, every Abhorsen has enemies. It may just be a petty necromancer with a better brain for strategy than most.”
“I slew a Dead thing at Cloven Crest,” Sabriel said slowly, thinking aloud. “It said it would have its revenge and spoke of telling the servants of Kerrigor. Do you know that name?”
“I know it,” spat Mogget, tail quivering straight out behind him. “But I cannot speak of it, except to say it is one of the Greater Dead, and your father’s most terrible enemy. Do not say it lives again!”
“I don’t know,” replied Sabriel, looking down at the cat, whose body seemed twisted, as if in turmoil between command and resistance. “Why can’t you tell me more? The binding?”
“A . . . a perversion of . . . the g . . . g . . . yes,” Mogget croaked out with effort. Though his green eyes seemed to grow luminous and fiery with anger at his own feeble explanation, he could say no more.
“Coils within coils,” remarked Sabriel thoughtfully. There seemed little doubt that some evil power was working against her, from the moment she’d crossed the Wall—or even before that, if her father’s disappearance was anything to go by.
She looked back through the telescope again and took some heart in the slowing of the work as the last light faded, though at the same time she felt a pang of sympathy for the poor people the Dead had enslaved. Many would probably freeze to death, or die of exhaustion, only to be brought back as dull-witted Hands. Only those who went over the waterfall would escape that fate. Truly, the Old Kingdom was a terrible place, when even death did not mean an end to slavery and despair.
“Is there another way out?” she asked, swivelling the telescope around 180 degrees to look at the northern bank. There were stepping-stones going there, too, and another door high on the riverbank, but there were also dark shapes clustered on the ledge by the door. Four or five Shadow Hands, too many for Sabriel to fight through alone.
“It seems not,” she answered herself grimly. “What of defenses, then? Can the sendings fight?”
“The sendings don’t need to fight,” replied Mogget. “For there is another defense, though it is a rather constrictive one. And there is one other way out, though you probably won’t like it.”
The sending next to her nodded and pantomimed something with its arm that looked like a snake wiggling through grass.
“What’s that?” asked Sabriel, fighting back a sudden urge to break into hysterical laughter. “The defense or the way out?”
“The defense,” replied Mogget. “The river itself. It can be invoked to rise almost to the height of the island walls—four times your height above the stepping-stones. Nothing can pass such a flood, in or out, till it subsides, in a matter of weeks.”
“So how would I get out?” asked Sabriel. “I can’t wait weeks!”
“One of your ancestors built a flying device. A Paperwing, she called it. You can use that, launched out over the waterfall.”
“Oh,” said Sabriel, in a little voice.
“If you do wish to raise the river,” Mogget continued, as if he hadn’t noticed Sabriel’s sudden silence, “then we must begin the ritual immediately. The flood comes from meltwater and the mountains are many leagues upstream. If we call the waters now, the flood will be on us by dusk tomorrow.”
Chapter Ten
THE ARRIVAL OF the floodwaters was heralded by great chunks of ice that came battering against the wooden bridge of grave dirt boxes like storm-borne icebergs ramming anchored ships. Ice shattered, wood splintered; a regular drumming that beat out a warning, announcing the great wave that followed the outriding ice.
Dead Hands and living slaves scurried back along the coffin bridge, the Dead’s shadowy bodies losing shape as they ran, so they became like long, thick worms of black crepe, squirming and sliding over rocks and boxes, throwing human slaves aside without mercy, desperate to escape the destruction that came roaring down the river.
Sabriel, watching from the tower, felt the people die, convulsively swallowing as she sensed their last breaths gurgling, sucking water instead of air. Some of them, at least two pairs, had deliberately thrown themselves into the river, choosing a final death, rather than risk eternal bondage. Most had been knocked, pushed or simply scared aside by the Dead.
The wavefront of the flood came swiftly after the ice, shouting as it came, a higher, fiercer roar than the deep bellow of the waterfall. Sabriel heard it for several seconds before it rounded the last bend of the river, then suddenly, it was almost upon her. A huge, vertical wall of water, with chunks of ice on its crest like marble battlements and all the debris of four hundred miles swilling about in its muddy body. It looked enormous, far taller than the island’s walls, taller even than the tower where Sabriel stared, shocked at the power she had unleashed, a power she had hardly dreamed possible when she’d summoned it the night before.
It had been a simple enough summoning. Mogget had taken her to the cellar and then down a winding, narrow stair, that grew colder and colder as they descended. Finally, they reached a strange grotto, where icicles hung and Sabriel’s breath blew clouds of white, but it was no longer cold, or perhaps so cold she no longer felt it. A block of pure, blue-white ice stood upon a stone pedestal, both limned with Charter marks, marks strange and beautiful. Then, following Mogget’s instruction, she’d simply placed her hand on the ice, and said, “Abhorsen pays her respects to the Clayr, and requests the gift of water.” That was all. They’d gone back up the stairs, a sending locked the cellar door behind them, and another brought Sabriel a nightshirt and a cup of hot chocolate.
But that simple ceremony had summoned something that seemed totally out of control. Sabriel watched the wave racing towards them, trying to calm herself, but her breath raced in and out as quickly as her stomach flipped over. Just as the wave hit, she screamed and ducked under the telescope.
The whole tower shook, stones screeching as they moved, and for a moment, even the sound of the waterfall was lost in a crack that sounded as if the island had been leveled by the first shock of the wave.
But, after a few seconds, the floor stopped shaking, and the crash of the flood subsided to a controlled roar, like a shouting drunk made aware of company. Sabriel hauled herself up the tripod and opened her eyes.
The walls had held, and though now the wave was past, the river still raged a mere handspan below the islan
d’s defenses and was almost up to the tunnel doors on either bank. There was no sign of the stepping-stones, the coffin bridge, the Dead, or any people—just a wide, brown rushing torrent, carrying debris of all descriptions. Trees, bushes, parts of buildings, livestock, chunks of ice—the flood had claimed its tribute from every riverbank for hundreds of miles.
Sabriel looked at this evidence of destruction and inwardly counted the number of villagers who had died on the grave boxes. Who knew how many other lives had been lost, or livelihoods threatened, upstream? Part of her tried to rationalize her use of the flood, telling her that she had to do it in order to fight on against the Dead. Another part said she had simply summoned the flood to save herself.
Mogget had no time for such introspection, mourning or pangs of responsibility. He left her watching, blank-eyed, for no more than a minute, before padding forward and delicately inserting his claws in Sabriel’s slippered foot.
“Ow! What did you—”
“There’s no time to waste sightseeing,” Mogget said. “The sendings are readying the Paperwing on the Eastern wall. And your clothing and gear have been ready for at least half an hour.”
“I’ve got all . . .” Sabriel began, then she remembered that her pack and skis lay at the bottom end of the entrance tunnel, probably as a pile of Mordicant-burned ash.
“The sendings have got everything you’ll need, and a few things you won’t, knowing them. You can get dressed, pack up, and head off for Belisaere. I take it you intend to go to Belisaere?”
“Yes,” replied Sabriel shortly. She could detect a tone of smugness in Mogget’s voice.
“Do you know how to get there?”
Sabriel was silent. Mogget already knew the answer was “no.” Hence the smugness.
“Do you have a . . . er . . . map?”
Sabriel shook her head, clenching her fists as she did so, resisting the urge to lean forward and spank Mogget, or perhaps give his tail a judicious tug. She had searched the study and asked several of the sendings, but the only map in the house seemed to be the starmap in the tower. The map Colonel Horyse had told her about must still be with Abhorsen. With Father, Sabriel thought, suddenly confused about their identities. If she was now Abhorsen, who was her father? Had he too once had a name that was lost in the responsibility of being Abhorsen? Everything that had seemed so certain and solid in her life a few days ago was crumbling. She didn’t even know who she was really, and trouble seemed to beset her from all sides—even a supposed servant of Abhorsen like Mogget seemed to provide more trouble than service.
