by Garth Nix
“That’s another reason for me to stay,” said Sabriel. She pointed up to the higher floors of the tower, where the Sixth Form had their much-coveted individual rooms. “I’ll get first pick of the senior studies.”
“Snag one for me right next to yours,” said Ellimere. She hugged Sabriel again, picked up her valise, and left, carefully shutting the door behind her.
Sabriel sighed and lay back on her bed. In truth, she would have liked to go with Ellimere and experience a carefree summer holiday, with nothing more rigorous than choosing what to wear each day and which young man to dance with that night. But it was not possible. Her father had laid down a strict schedule for her, reading The Book of the Dead. This could not be done any farther south, for the book was entirely magical, an artifact of both Free and Charter Magic, and simply would not exist if it was taken too far from the Wall.
It was typical of her father that he should insist on her continuing the essential training to be an Abhorsen, while at the same time he refused to answer so many of her questions about what her future might hold, most particularly whether she was going to become his Abhorsen-in-Waiting or not. Sabriel couldn’t work out what he wanted from her. Sometimes he talked as if she would stay in Ancelstierre, never to return to the Old Kingdom, and sometimes he spoke of her return as if it was definite and soon to be arranged. As she had grown older, she had realized the talk of her staying in Ancelstierre came when he was tired, or wounded and recovering, and that he wanted to keep her safe. But at the same time he feared she would have to come back, so he insisted she learn the necromantic and anti-necromantic arts that would be necessary.
In any case, Terciel would be visiting in a few days, at the dark of the moon. Not physically, but via a kind of sending, a magical presence. Not like the more permanent, individual sendings who had been made to be servants by many past Abhorsens, but a temporary magical projection of himself, made of bright moonlight and Charter Magic. For in the Old Kingdom, there would be a full moon when it was dark here in Ancelstierre. The seasons and time changed when you crossed the Wall, a very sharp and sudden divide, unlike the magic, which spilled across.
Which meant, Sabriel thought, she had better get on with reading the current chapter of The Book of the Dead, as her father would quiz her on it when he visited. She sat up, reached under her bed, and drew out the tin trunk that contained those things best not seen by the school servants and her friends, even those who were to some degree Charter Mages. This was another thing her father had insisted on, later explaining it would be a burden for them to know that she was any kind of necromancer. They would not understand that the Abhorsens only used the Free Magic forbidden to Charter Mages, and the associated necromantic arts, to lay the Dead to rest and banish those who had returned to Life.
This was particularly true in Ancelstierre, where the great majority of the population lived farther south and so did not believe in magic at all, and when, if they came north and chanced to experience it for themselves, tended to double down on fear and denial. At least at first, until the continued presence of magic became undeniable. Then they would lose the denial, but keep the fear.
Even those northern Ancelstierrans who were Charter Mages, like the school’s own Magistrix Greenwood, typically had no experience of Free Magic other than the inimical, often experienced in very frightening circumstances. This was exacerbated by their generally limited knowledge even of Charter Magic, with greater arts and powers seeming to them very dangerous and threatening.
Sabriel herself, at sixteen, was already a much more expert Charter Mage than Greenwood. In addition to being trained by her father, she had access to many more grimoires and references, which Terciel had again forbidden her to share. He was not very complimentary about the Charter Mages south of the Wall and, apart from making it possible for his daughter to practice her magic with others, thought it would be better if they left well enough alone. Sabriel had only recently come to question this, in the way that children accept their parents’ thinking, sometimes for too long.
She did not think it was so simple. Charter Magic would still spread beyond the Wall, and so would Free Magic and the things it sometimes brought, including incursions by the Dead. If there were no Ancelstierrans capable of using Charter Magic, there would be no one who could resist such depredations. “Leaving well enough alone” could only be achieved by completely abandoning a great swath of Ancelstierre for thirty or forty miles south of the Wall, and that was not going to happen.
The books her father sent her, among other things, were in the trunk. Sabriel unlocked it with a spell made of three tiny Charter marks which wound their way into the keyhole. No key of iron or steel could ever turn that lock, nor could it be forced. If taken far enough south, the trunk could be broken open, but there would be nothing inside but dust.
The Book of the Dead was in the corner of the trunk, in a velvet bag. Sabriel took it to her desk, carefully loosened the drawstrings of the bag, and took out the book. It looked innocuous enough, simply an old tome bound in green leather with silver corner reinforcements and a silver clasp. But as Sabriel touched it, Charter marks rose in metal and leather, spells began to form, marks of blinding, closing, and imprisonment readying themselves.
Sabriel reached inside herself, not out to the Charter, and found the core of Free Magic that lay within every necromancer and every Abhorsen. In her it was contained and constrained by the Charter Magic that was in every part of her blood and bone, but it was still there. She let some small fraction of that power escape, infusing her breath with a single word, a command backed by her focused will.
“Open!”
Only a trained necromancer could open The Book of the Dead. Yet only an uncorrupted Charter Mage could close the Abhorsen’s particular edition of the grimoire. Someone who was neither would be struck down by the spells that were now easing back into the binding, having recognized a rightful reader.
As usual, the book flipped open, at the point where Sabriel had previously stopped reading. But what was not at all usual was the presence of something between the pages.
A dried flower, pressed flat, most of its color gone. The stalk was a very pale straw color, and the petals might once have been a reddish kind of bronze and were bifurcated at the ends like a snake’s forked tongue. It was not a flower Sabriel had ever seen before, or remembered, and she instinctively thought it must be from the Old Kingdom.
She gently closed her thumb and finger on the stalk to pick it up, but it dissolved, crumbling into a dust so fine that it disappeared as it fell, leaving no stain on book or desk. It was as if it had never existed at all.
Sabriel frowned, inspected her fingers for any remnant dust—there wasn’t any—took up a pencil, and quickly sketched the flower on a scrap of blotting paper and wrote underneath it Dried flower from BOD. She had no idea what the presence of the flower in the book meant, but she knew the grimoire was tricksome. It sometimes made her forget things she had read in it until some suitable occasion for her to remember. Her father confirmed this was one of the tome’s known effects.
It also could not be finished, even when you turned the last page, because when you went back, there were often new chapters, though the final page was always the same. That single line: Does the walker choose the path, or the path the walker?
Sabriel spent several hours memorizing the pages set for her, without particular difficulty and without any more pressed flowers or other unexpected inserts. At suppertime she went downstairs to the refectory and joined the half dozen girls, all younger, who had to stay at the school. The meal was supervised by a very grumpy junior teacher who would have liked not to be there but had lost the lottery that chose the summer stayers, and was served by the much cheerier school servants, who, while taking turns for their much shorter holidays, even if they were the ones left behind, welcomed the greatly decreased workload and change of routine of the long summer vacation.
After supper, Sabriel climbed the many step
s to the top of the North Tower, where Magistrix Greenwood had established the new Magic Room, or as it was officially known on the school plans, “Extracurricular Workroom Two.” There was another, much older room for practicing magic in a cavern below the East Tower, but some of the warding spells there had become unstable. In any case, Greenwood preferred to have air and light, and she had managed to convince Mrs. Umbrade, the headmistress, to allow them the use of the topmost tower room.
As even very basic Charter Magic could go terribly wrong, Sabriel was assisting Magistrix Greenwood in placing spells designed to both quell spells gone awry and to prevent access to the more complex and dangerous marks. They had started by examining the spells in the old cavern, trying to unravel the complex combinations of marks and the centuries of overlapping spells, but this had proved very difficult and slow. Finally, Sabriel had asked her father, and he had provided a book that set out the hundred and sixteen spells considered necessary to make a space safe for the practice of Charter Magic.
But he had, as always, insisted she keep the book to herself. So Sabriel had to learn the spell first, teach it to Greenwood, and then they would both cast it, taking ceiling, wall, window, door, or floor in turns. Thus each spell had to be cast many times. Both Sabriel and Greenwood considered it a triumph that after only six months they were up to the ninety-eighth spell.
Near midnight, they finished the one hundredth spell, the marks sinking into the ceiling from Sabriel’s fingers as she stood on a chair, and Greenwood sliding down the wall she’d just bespelled, to sit on the floor with her legs stretched out in front of her.
“I am so tired,” she said with a yawn. “I don’t know how you aren’t, Sabriel.”
“I am,” said Sabriel, stepping down from the chair and promptly sitting on it. “I was trying not to show it in front of you. I was ready to stop after the last spell.”
“Possibly we should have,” said Greenwood. “I am always telling the girls to be aware of their limits.”
She got up with a groan and stretched. “Same time tomorrow? It would be good to get this place finished, and then we can practice some other magic ourselves. I am heartily sick of all these variations on a theme done a dozen times. I should have chosen somewhere with fewer windows. No wonder the old room was underground. Though I am also very grateful to learn this magic, Sabriel. Don’t get me wrong.”
“My father says this is the best way to master new spells,” said Sabriel with a wry shrug. She got up herself and pulled the door completely open, Charter marks glowing in the wood under her fingers. “Repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, and then for good measure cast the spell another thousand times, that’s his motto. I’ll be here after supper tomorrow.”
They started down the stairs together, flicking the electric lights off behind them.
“It’s always strange to be in the school over summer,” said Greenwood. “Dark and quiet, with the warm days so long but so empty of life and activity. Restful, in a way, but also a little disturbing. As if the whole place has slipped into a too-long sleep, one from which it might not awaken. Though of course I know it will, and I’ll both partly dread and partly welcome the sound of the charabancs coming up from the station and everyone bustling about and greeting one another, and the new girls trying not to cry and all of it . . . I know, I’m being ridiculous; the summer has only just begun.”
“Perhaps you should have gone away,” said Sabriel lightly. “Like everyone else. Almost everyone.”
“Perhaps,” said Greenwood. She stopped by the door that would take her to the long corridor that ran past the ground-floor classrooms through to the eastern side of the school and outside to the row of teachers’ houses, while Sabriel would take the door on the other side to head toward her own room on the second floor of the South Tower. She looked back at Sabriel. “But I find I don’t like going too far south. I usually spend the summer at a friend’s house near Bain, but she . . . well, it wasn’t convenient this year. Never mind! I am glad we are both here, to finish our magic room and get a good start before the new school year. Thank you again, and good night!”
It was dark in the main north-south corridor of the central range. In term time, some lights were always left on, but someone had been quick to switch everything off. Sabriel sketched a single Charter mark for light, the simplest of all spells, and held it in her hand to light her way, striding down the hall in solitary splendor, eager for her bed.
There were more girls at breakfast. Sabriel counted twenty-two, smiling as she noted the small departures from strict uniform many had already adopted, though no one had dared to completely abandon it. The headmistress might be away, but a few senior teachers were known to be present, in addition to those unfortunate juniors who had to supervise the summer stayers, as they were known.
Though not Sabriel. As she was going into the Sixth Form, she was left to her own recognizance, though in truth this had nearly always been the case anyway. She had been seen as a kind of independent force from her earliest days at Wyverley, by both the staff and students. Sabriel had been careful not to upset this status, and did not flaunt her rule-breaking. Mrs. Umbrade, for her part, chose to look the other way wherever possible, and the other teachers followed her lead.
After breakfast, Sabriel went fishing in the deep pond in the northeastern corner of the school grounds. She rarely caught anything, but she liked to sit on the jetty with her bare feet in the water, watching her float bob about and occasionally dip as a fish had a nibble. It was particularly nice on a hot day, as this one was becoming, the clouds that had delivered a light rain earlier departing to allow the sun to shine through in full force.
There was a wind. A gentle breeze that Sabriel felt on her face and then, shifting around, grew cooler and lifted her newly bobbed hair at the back of her neck. A hairdresser came to the school from Bain with her three assistants every month, bearing magazines with photographs of theater and the newer kinetograph stars. Bobbed hair had become the hairstyle of choice for practically all the girls the year before, and the fashion showed no sign of abating.
Sabriel absently flattened her hair down, then suddenly stiffened, stood up, and looked at the pattern of the wind upon the pond and the way the treetops were moving in the copse known to the students as Smokers Wood, for the malcontents who hid there with their illicit packets of gaspers.
The wind was now coming from the north.
From the Old Kingdom.
This was a rare occurrence. The season, time, and weather were entirely different between Ancelstierre and the Old Kingdom. When a wind came south, crossing the Wall, it was either the result of some magical incident in the Old Kingdom, or a purposeful summoning. Such a wind brought with it the magic of the north, making both Free and Charter Magic stronger wherever the wind blew, even if it was considerably farther south than any such magic usually worked.
Sabriel picked up her rod, reeled in, and hurried back to the school. Halfway there, she saw Magistrix Greenwood, who made a beeline for her. The wind was growing stronger as they met.
“The telephone and electricity are already faltering,” said Greenwood anxiously. “If this wind grows any stronger—”
She stopped and turned her head. Sabriel did too, as they both heard the bell from the village of Wyverley, tolling a warning to all who heard it. Everyone feared what the north wind might bring.
“I’m not sure there is anything to be worried about yet,” said Sabriel. She looked up, studying the sky. “The sun is too bright, too strong, and there is no cloud anywhere. But we should plan to gather everyone in somewhere defensible by nightfall.”
“The library,” said Greenwood. It was a newer but still very solid brick-built three-story building separate from the main school, located behind the internal quad, and it had fewer doors and windows. “I’ll organize it.”
The bell in the village still tolled, its harsh call carried to them by the wind.
“I’ll go and make some preparations,” said Sabr
iel. “Just in case.”
Back in her room, Sabriel returned to her tin trunk, this time taking out a sword that was not made for practice. She sharpened it with a whetstone and oil for an hour or more, until satisfied with the edge, then laid it on her bed and took up a stick of chalk purloined from a classroom. With this, she marked the use-names of twelve Charter marks along the blade, marks for sharpness and strength and fire. Together they made up a spell that was very dangerous to cast, which was why she had marked the use-names first, as mnemonics, so she did not lose her way or get the marks out of order as she cast the spell. Sabriel didn’t really think she had to do this, but her father had insisted she follow this process for any of the more powerful spells.
She did not bring forth the actual marks and cast the spell, not yet. It would only last for a limited time, and she would need it for the night.
When the sword was ready, she took out The Book of the Dead again, this time to reread and refresh her mind on the subject of using only one’s own voice and body to conjure and channel the power of the seven necromantic bells, at least in the very limited fashion possible. She did not have bells of her own, nor the set of pipes used in training. Terciel had brought pipes for her to practice on several times on his actual physical visits, but he had always taken them away again. Like the bells, they were dangerous in themselves.
Sabriel fixed the subject she wanted to read in her mind, infused her voice with raw power, and spoke.
“Open!”
The book slowly yawned open, as if waking from sleep. Sabriel saw it was the right chapter—“On Voice and Whistle and Bodily Percussion in Place of the Bells”—but that was not what primarily attracted her eye. There was a loose piece of paper, torn at the edges, diagonally placed across the open spread. There was a drawing of a horse with poppy eyes, not very well done, in the top corner, and beneath it various scribblings in an untidy hand. She frowned as she read them, for they made no particular sense:
