Sabriel (Old Kingdom Book 1)

by Garth Nix

  “Millennia of servitude, Abhorsen. Chained by trickery, treachery . . . captive in a repulsive, fixed-flesh shape . . . but there will be payment, slow payment—not quick, not quick at all!”

  A tendril lashed out, low this time, trying to trip her. Sabriel leapt over it, blade extended, lunging for the creature’s chest. But it shimmied aside, extruding extra arms as she tried to jump back, catching her in mid-leap, drawing her close.

  Sword-arm pinioned at her side, it tightened its grip, till she was close against its chest, her face a finger-width from its boiling, constantly moving flesh, as if a billion tiny insects buzzed behind a membrane of utter darkness.

  Another arm gripped the back of her helmet, forcing her to look up, till she saw its head, directly above her. A thing of most basic anatomy, its eyes were like the sinkhole, deep pits without apparent bottom. It had no nose, but a mouth that split the horrid face in two, a mouth slightly parted to reveal the burning blue-white glare that it had first used as flesh.

  All Charter Magic had fled from Sabriel’s mind. Her sword was trapped, the bells likewise, and even if they weren’t, she didn’t know how to use them properly against things not Dead. She ran over them mentally anyway, in a frantic, lightning inventory of anything that might help.

  It was then her tired, concussed mind remembered the ring. It was on her left hand, her free hand, cool silver on the index finger.

  But she didn’t know what to do with it—and the creature’s head was bowing down towards her own, its neck stretching impossibly long, till it was like a snake’s head rearing above her, the mouth opening wider, growing brighter, fizzing with white-hot sparks that fell upon her helmet and face, burning cloth and skin, leaving tiny, tattoo-like scars. The ring felt loose on her finger. Sabriel instinctively curled her hand, and the ring felt looser still, slipping down her finger, expanding, growing, till without looking, Sabriel knew she held a silver hoop as wide or wider than the creature’s slender head. And she suddenly knew what to do.

  “First, the plucking of an eye,” said the thing, breath as hot as the falling sparks, scorching her face with instant sunburn. It tilted its head sideways and opened its mouth still wider, lower jaw dislocating out.

  Sabriel took one last, careful look, screwed her eyes tight against the terrible glare, and flipped the silver hoop up, and she hoped, over the thing’s neck.

  For a second, as the heat increased and she felt a terrible burning pain against her eye, Sabriel thought she’d missed. Then the hoop was wrenched from her hand and she was thrown away, hurled out like an angry fisherman’s rejected minnow.

  On the cool flagstones again, she opened her eyes, the left one blurry, sore and swimming with tears—but still there and still working.

  She had put the silver hoop over the thing’s head, and it was slowly sliding down that long, sinuous neck. The ring was shrinking again as it slid, impervious to the creature’s desperate attempts to get it off. It had six or seven hands now, formed directly from its shoulders, all squirming about, trying to force fingers under the ring. But the metal seemed inimical to the creature’s substance, like a hot pan to human fingers, for the fingers flinched and danced around it, but could not take hold for longer than a second.

  The darkness that stained it was ebbing too, draining down through its thrashing, twisting support, leaving glowing whiteness behind. Still the creature fought with the ring, blazing hands forming and re-forming, body twisting and turning, even bucking, as if it could throw the ring like a rider from a horse.

  Finally, it gave up and turned towards Sabriel, screaming and crackling. Two long arms sprang out from it, reaching towards Sabriel’s sprawling body, talons growing from the hands, raking the stone with deep gouges as they scrabbled towards her, like spiders scuttling to their prey—only to fall short by a yard or more.

  “No!” howled the thing, and its whole twisting, coiling body lurched forward, killing arms outstretched. Again, the talons fell short, as Sabriel crawled, rolled and pushed herself away.

  Then the silver ring contracted once more, and a terrible shout of anguish, rage and despair came from the very center of the white-flaming thing. Its arms suddenly shrank back to its torso; the head fell into the shoulders, and the whole body sank into an amorphous blob of shimmering white, with a single, still-large silver band around the middle, the ruby glittering like a drop of blood.

  Sabriel stared at it, unable to look aside, or do anything else, even quell the flow from her bleeding nose, which now covered half her face and chin, her mouth glued shut with dried and clotting blood. It seemed to her that something was left undone, something that she had to provide.

  Nervously crawling closer, she saw that there were now marks on the ring, Charter marks that told her what she must do. Wearily, she got up on her knees and fumbled with the bell-bandolier. Saraneth was heavy, almost beyond her strength, but she managed to draw it out, and the deep, compelling voice rang through the sinkhole, seeming to pierce the glowing, silver-bound mass.

  The ring hummed in answer to the bell and exuded a pear-shaped drop of its own metal, which cooled to become a miniature Saraneth. At the same time, the ring changed color and consistency. The ruby’s color seemed to run, and a red wash spread through the silver. It was now dull and ordinary, no longer a silver band, but a red leather collar, with a miniature silver bell.

  With this change, the white mass quivered, and shone bright again, till Sabriel had to shield her eyes once more. When the shadows grew together again, she looked back, and there was Mogget, collared in red leather, sitting up and looking like he was about to throw up a hairball.

  It wasn’t a hairball, but a silver ring, the ruby reflecting Mogget’s internal light. It rolled to Sabriel, tinkling across the stone. She picked it up and slid it back on her finger.

  Mogget’s glow faded, and the burning Paperwing was now only faint embers, sad memories and ash. Darkness returned, cloaking Sabriel, wrapping her up with all her hurts and fears. She sat, silent, not even thinking.

  A little later, she felt a soft cat nose against her folded hands, and a candle, damp from Mogget’s mouth.

  “Your nose is still bleeding,” said a familiar, didactic voice. “Light the candle, pinch your nose, and get some blankets out for us to sleep. It’s getting cold.”

  “Welcome back, Mogget,” whispered Sabriel.

  Chapter Thirteen

  NEITHER SABRIEL NOR Mogget mentioned the happenings of the previous night when they awoke. Sabriel, bathing her seriously swollen nose in an inch of water from her canteen, found that she didn’t particularly want to remember a waking nightmare, and Mogget was quiet, in an apologetic way. Despite what happened later, freeing Mogget’s alter ego, or whatever it was, had saved them from certain destruction by the wind.

  As she’d expected, dawn had brought some light to the sinkhole, and as the day progressed, this had grown to a level approximating twilight. Sabriel could read and see things close by quite clearly, but they merged into indistinct gloom twenty or thirty yards away.

  Not that the sinkhole was much larger than that—perhaps a hundred yards in diameter, not the fifty she’d guessed at when she was coming down. The entire floor of it was paved, with a circular drain in the middle, and there were several tunnel entrances into the sheer rock walls—tunnels which Sabriel knew she would eventually have to take, as there was no water in the sinkhole. There seemed little chance of rain, either. It was cool, but nowhere near as cold as the plateau near Abhorsen’s House. The climate was mitigated by proximity to the ocean, and an altitude that could easily be sea-level or below, for in daylight Sabriel could see that the sinkhole was at least a hundred yards deep.

  Still, with a half-full canteen of water gurgling by her side, Sabriel was quite content to slouch upon her slightly scorched pack and apply herbal creams to her bruises, and a poultice of evil-smelling tanmaril leaves to her strange sunburn. Her nose was a different matter when it came to treatment. It wasn’t broken—m
erely hideous, swollen and encrusted with dried blood, which hurt too much to clean off completely.

  Mogget, after an hour or so of sheepish silence, sauntered off to explore, refusing Sabriel’s offer of hard cakes and dried meat for breakfast. She expected he’d find a rat, or something equally appetizing, instead. In a way, she was quite pleased he was gone. The memory of the Free Magic beast that lay within the little white cat was still disturbing.

  Even so, when the sun had risen to become a little disc surrounded by the greater circumference of the sinkhole’s rim, she started to wonder why he hadn’t come back. Levering herself up, she limped over to the tunnel he’d chosen, using her sword as a walking stick and complaining quietly as every bruise reminded her of its location.

  Of course, just as she was lighting a candle at the tunnel entrance Mogget reappeared behind her.

  “Looking for me?” he mewed, innocently.

  “Who else?” replied Sabriel. “Have you found anything? Anything useful, I mean. Water, for instance.”

  “Useful?” mused Mogget, rubbing his chin back along his two outstretched front legs. “Perhaps. Interesting, certainly. Water? Yes.”

  “How far away?” asked Sabriel, all too aware of her bruise-limited mobility. “And what does interesting mean? Dangerous?”

  “Not far, by this tunnel,” replied Mogget. “There is a little danger getting there—a trap and a few other oddments, but nothing that will harm you. As to the interesting part, you will have to see for yourself, Abhorsen.”

  “Sabriel,” said Sabriel automatically, as she tried to think ahead. She needed at least two days’ rest, but no more than that. Every day lost before she found her father’s corporeal body might mean disaster. She simply had to find him soon.

  A Mordicant, Shadow Hands, gore crows—it was now all too clear that some terrible enemy was arrayed against both father and daughter. That enemy had already trapped her father, so it had to be a very powerful necromancer, or some Greater Dead creature. Perhaps this Kerrigor . . .

  “I’ll get my pack,” she decided, trudging back, Mogget slipping backwards and forwards across her path like a kitten, almost tripping her, but always just getting out of the way. Sabriel put this down to inexplicable catness, and didn’t comment.

  As Mogget had promised, the tunnel wasn’t long, and its well-made steps and cross-hatched floor made passage easy, save for the part where Sabriel had to follow the little cat exactly across the stones, to avoid a cleverly concealed pit. Without Mogget’s guidance, Sabriel knew she would have fallen in.

  There were magical wardings too. Old, inimical spells lay like moths in the corners of the tunnel, waiting to fly up at her, to surround and choke her with power—but something checked their first reaction and they settled again. A few times, Sabriel experienced a ghostly touch, like a hand reaching out to brush the Charter mark on her forehead, and almost at the end of the tunnel, she saw two guard sendings melting into the rock, the tips of their halberds glinting in her candlelight before they, too, merged into stone.

  “Where are we going?” she whispered, nervously, as the door in front of them slowly creaked open—without visible means of propulsion.

  “Another sinkhole,” Mogget said, matter-of-factly. “It is where the First Blood . . . ach . . .”

  He choked, hissed, and then rephrased his sentence rather drably, with “It is interesting.”

  “What do you mean—” Sabriel began, but she fell silent as they passed the doorway, magical force suddenly tugging at her hair, her hands, her surcoat, the hilt of her sword. Mogget’s fur stood on end, and his collar rotated halfway around of its own accord, till the Charter marks of binding were uppermost and clearly readable, bright against the leather.

  Then they were out, standing at the bottom of another sinkhole, in a premature twilight, for the sun was already slipping over the circumscribed horizon of the sinkhole rim.

  This sinkhole was much wider than the first—perhaps a mile across, and deeper, say six or seven hundred feet. Despite its size, the entire vast pit was sealed off from the upper air by a gleaming, web-thin net, which seemed to merge into the rim wall about a quarter of the way down from the surface. Sunlight had given it away, but even so, Sabriel had to use her telescope to see the delicate diamond-pattern weave clearly. It looked flimsy, but the presence of several dessicated bird-corpses indicated considerable strength. Sabriel guessed the unfortunate birds had dived into the net, eyes greedily intent on food below.

  In the sinkhole itself, there was considerable, if uninspiring vegetation—mostly stunted trees and malformed bushes. But Sabriel had little attention to spare for the trees, for in between each of these straggling patches of greenery, there were paved areas—and on each of these paved areas rested a ship.

  Fourteen open-decked, single-masted longboats, their black sails set to catch a nonexistent wind, oars out to battle an imaginary tide. They flew many flags and standards, all limp against mast and rigging, but Sabriel didn’t need to see them unfurled to know what strange cargo these ships might bear. She’d heard of this place, as had every child in the Northern parts of Ancelstierre, close to the Old Kingdom. Hundreds of tales of treasure, adventure and romance were woven around this strange harbor.

  “Funerary ships,” said Sabriel. “Royal ships.”

  She had further confirmation that this was so, for there were binding spells woven into the very dirt her feet scuffed at the tunnel entrance, spells of final death that could only have been laid by an Abhorsen. No necromancer would ever raise any of the ancient rulers of the Old Kingdom.

  “The famous burial ground of the First . . . ckkk . . . the Kings and Queens of the Old Kingdom,” pronounced Mogget, after some difficulty. He danced around Sabriel’s feet, then stood on his hind legs and made expansive gestures, like a circus impresario in white fur. Finally, he shot off into the trees.

  “Come on—there’s a spring, spring, spring!” he caroled, as he leapt up and down in time with his words.

  Sabriel followed at a slower pace, shaking her head and wondering what had happened to make Mogget so cheerful. She felt bruised, tired and depressed, shaken by the Free Magic monster, and sad about the Paperwing.

  They passed close by two of the ships on their way to the spring. Mogget led her a merry dance around both of them, in a mad circumnavigation of twists, leaps and bounds, but the sides were too high to look in and she didn’t feel like shinning up an oar. She did pause to look at the figureheads—imposing men, one in his forties, the other somewhat older. Both were bearded, had the same imperious eyes, and wore armor similar to Sabriel’s, heavily festooned with medallions, chains and other decorations. Each held a sword in his right hand, and an unfurling scroll that turned back on itself in their left—the heraldic representation of the Charter.

  The third ship was different. It seemed shorter and less ornate, with a bare mast devoid of black sails. No oars sprang from its sides, and as Sabriel reached the spring that lay under its stern, she saw uncaulked seams between the planking, and realized that it was incomplete.

  Curious, she dropped her pack by the little pool of bubbling water and walked around to the bow. This was different too, for the figurehead was a young man—a naked young man, carved in perfect detail.

  Sabriel blushed a little, for it was an exact likeness, as if a young man had been transformed from flesh to wood, and her only prior experience of naked men was in clinical cross-sections from biology textbooks. His muscles were lean and well-formed, his hair short and tightly curled against his head. His hands, well-shaped and elegant, were partly raised, as if to ward off some evil.

  The detail even extended to a circumcised penis, which Sabriel glanced at in an embarrassed way, before looking back at his face. He was not exactly handsome, but not displeasing. It was a responsible visage, with the shocked expression of someone who has been betrayed and only just realized it. There was fear there, too, and something like hatred. He looked more than a little mad. His exp
ression troubled her, for it seemed too human to be the result of a woodcarver’s skill, no matter how talented.

  “Too life-like,” Sabriel muttered, stepping back from the figurehead, hand falling to the hilt of her sword, her magical senses reaching out, seeking some trap or deception.

  There was no trap, but Sabriel did feel something in or around the figurehead. A feeling similar to that of a Dead revenant, but not the same—a niggling sensation that she couldn’t place.

  Sabriel tried to identify it, while she looked over the figurehead again, carefully examining him from every angle. The man’s body was an intellectual problem now, so she looked without embarrassment, studying his fingers, fingernails and skin, noting how perfectly they were carved, right down to the tiny scars on his hands, the product of sword and dagger practice. There was also the faint sign of a baptismal Charter mark on his forehead, and the pale trace of veins on his eyelids.

  That inspection led her to certainty about what she’d detected, but she hesitated about the action that should be taken, and went in search of Mogget. Not that she put a lot of faith in advice or answers from that quarter, given his present propensity towards behaving as a fairly silly cat—though perhaps this was a reaction to his brief experience of being a Free Magic beast again, something that might not have happened for a millennium. The cat form was probably a welcome relief.

  In fact, no advice at all could be had from Mogget. Sabriel found him asleep in a field of flowers near the spring, his tail and paddy-paws twitching to a dream of dancing mice. Sabriel looked at the straw-yellow flowers, sniffed one, scratched Mogget behind the ears, then went back to the figurehead. The flowers were catbalm, explaining both Mogget’s previous mood and his current somnolence. She would have to make up her own mind.

  “So,” she said, addressing the figurehead like a lawyer before a court. “You are the victim of some Free Magic spell and necromantic trickery. Your spirit lies neither in Life nor Death, but somewhere in between. I could cross into Death, and find you near the border, I’m sure—but I could find a lot of trouble as well. Trouble I can’t deal with in my current pathetic state. So what can I do? What would Father—Abhorsen . . . or any Abhorsen—do in my place?”