Sabriel (Old Kingdom Book 1)

by Garth Nix

  “You’ve been out by yourself!” exclaimed Lirael. Forgetting that she had been afraid of whatever the Dog might be, she stormed in, slamming the door behind her. In the process, she dropped the clockwork mouse, but not the ham bone.

  The mouse bounced twice and landed at the Dog’s feet. Lirael held her breath, all too aware that the door was now shut at her back, which would greatly delay the mouse if she needed help. But the Dog didn’t seem dangerous, and she was so much easier to talk to than people were . . . except for Filris, who was gone.

  The Disreputable Dog sniffed at the mouse eagerly for an instant, then pushed it aside with her nose and transferred her attention back to the ham bone.

  Lirael sighed, picked up the mouse, and put it back in her pocket. She unwrapped the bone and gave it to the Dog, who immediately snatched it up and deposited it in a far corner under the desk.

  “That’s your dinner,” said Lirael, wrinkling her nose. “You’d better eat it before it starts to smell.”

  “I’ll take it out and bury it later, in the ice,” replied the Dog. She hesitated and hung her head a little before adding, “Besides, I don’t actually need to eat. I just like to.”

  “What!” exclaimed Lirael, cross again. “You mean I’ve been stealing food for nothing! If I were caught I’d—”

  “Not for nothing!” interrupted the Dog, sidling over to butt her head against Lirael’s hip and look up at her with wide, beseeching eyes. “For me. And much appreciated, too. Now, you really should feel my collar. It will show you that I am not a Stilken, Margrue, or Hish. You can scratch my neck at the same time.”

  Lirael hesitated, but the Dog felt so like the friendly dogs she scratched when they visited the Refectory that her hand almost automatically went to the Dog’s back. She felt warm dog skin and the silky, short hair, and she began to scratch along the Dog’s spine, up towards the neck. The Dog shivered and muttered, “Up a bit. Across to the left. No, back. Aahhh!”

  Then Lirael touched the collar, just with two fingers—and was momentarily thrown out of the world altogether. All she could see, hear, and feel were Charter marks, all around, as if she had somehow fallen into the Charter. There was no leather collar under her hand, no Dog, no study. Nothing but the Charter.

  Then she was suddenly back in herself again, swaying and dizzy. Both her hands were scratching the Dog under the chin, without her knowing how they had got there.

  “Your collar,” Lirael said, when she got her balance back. “Your collar is like a Charter Stone—a way into the Charter. Yet I saw Free Magic in your making. It has to be there somewhere . . . doesn’t it?”

  She fell silent, but the Dog didn’t answer, till Lirael stopped scratching. Then she turned her head and jumped up, licking Lirael across her open mouth.

  “You needed a friend,” said the Dog, as Lirael spluttered and wiped her mouth with both sleeves, one after the other. “I came. Isn’t that enough to be going on with? You know my collar is of the Charter, and whatever else I may be, it would constrain my actions, even if I did mean you any harm. And we do have a Stilken to deal with, do we not?”

  “Yes,” said Lirael. On an impulse, she bent down and hugged the Dog around the neck, feeling both warm dog and the soft buzz of the Charter marks in the Dog’s collar through the thin material of her shirt.

  The Disreputable Dog bore this patiently for a minute, then made a sort of wheezing sound and shuffled her paws. Lirael understood this from her time with the visiting dogs, and let go.

  “Now,” pronounced the Dog. “The Stilken must be dealt with as soon as possible, before it gets free and finds even worse things to release, or let in from outside. I presume you have obtained the necessary items to bind it?”

  “No,” said Lirael. “Not if you mean the stuff Nagy mentions: a rowan wand or a sword, infused with the Charter marks—”

  “Yes, yes,” said the Dog hastily, before Lirael could recite the whole list. “I know. Why haven’t you got one?”

  “They don’t just lie around,” replied Lirael defensively. “I thought I could get an ordinary sword and put the—”

  “Take too long. Months!” interrupted the Dog, who had started pacing to and fro in a serious manner. “That Stilken will be through your door spell in a few days, I would think.”

  “What!” screamed Lirael. Then she said more quietly, “What? You mean it’s escaping?”

  “It will soon,” confirmed the Dog. “I thought you knew. Free Magic can corrode Charter marks as well as flesh. I suppose you could renew the spell.”

  Lirael shook her head. Her throat still hadn’t recovered from the master mark she’d used last time. It would be too risky to chance speaking it again before she was completely better. Not without the added strength of a Charter-spelled sword—which brought her back to the original problem.

  “You’ll have to borrow a sword, then,” declared the Dog, fixing Lirael with a serious eye. “I don’t suppose anyone will have the right sort of wand. Not really a Clayr thing, rowan.”

  “I don’t think swords redolent with binding spells are, either,” protested Lirael, slumping into her chair. “Why couldn’t I just be an ordinary Clayr? If I’d got the Sight, I wouldn’t be wandering around the Library getting into trouble! If I ever do get the Sight, I swear by the Charter I am never going to go exploring, ever again!”

  “Mmmm,” said the Dog, with an expression Lirael couldn’t fathom, though it seemed to be loaded with hidden meaning. “That’s as may be. On the matter of swords, you are in error. There are a number of swords of power within these halls. The Captain of the Rangers has one, the Observatory Guard have three—well, one is an axe, but it holds the same spells within its steel. Closer to home, the Chief Librarian has one, too. A very old and famous sword, in fact, most appropriately named Binder. It will do nicely.”

  Lirael looked at the Dog with such a blank stare that the hound stopped pacing, cleared her throat, and said, “Pay attention, Lirael. I said that you were in error about—”

  “I heard what you said,” snapped Lirael. “You must be absolutely mad! I can’t steal the Chief’s sword! She always has it with her! She probably sleeps with it!”

  “She does,” replied the Dog smugly. “I checked.”

  “Dog!” wailed Lirael, trying to keep her breathing down to less than one breath a second. “Please, please do not go looking in the Chief Librarian’s rooms! Or anywhere else! What would happen if someone saw you?”

  “They didn’t,” replied the Dog happily. “Anyway, the Chief keeps the sword in her bedroom, but not actually in bed with her. She puts it on a stand next to her bed. So you can borrow it while she’s asleep.”

  “No,” replied Lirael, shaking her head. “I’m not creeping into the Chief’s bedroom. I’d rather fight the Stilken without a sword.”

  “Then you’ll die,” said the Disreputable Dog, suddenly very serious. “The Stilken will drink your blood and grow stronger from it. Then it will creep out into the lower reaches of the Library, emerging every now and then to capture librarians, to take them one by one, feasting on their flesh in some dark corner where the bones will never be found. It will find allies, creatures bound even deeper in the Library, and will open doors for the evil that lurks outside. You must bind it, but you cannot succeed without the sword.”

  “What if you help me?” asked Lirael. There had to be some way of avoiding the Chief, some way that didn’t involve swords at all. Trying to get Mirelle’s sword, or the ones from the Observatory, would not be any easier than the Chief’s. She didn’t even know exactly where the Observatory was.

  “I’d like to,” replied the Dog. “But it is your Stilken. You let it out. You must deal with the consequences.”

  “So you won’t help,” said Lirael sadly. She had hoped, just for a moment, that the Disreputable Dog would step in and fix everything for her. She was a magical creature, after all, possibly of some power. But not enough to take on a Stilken, it seemed.

  �
�I will advise,” said the Dog. “As is only proper. But you will have to borrow the sword yourself, and perform the binding. Tonight is probably as good a time as any.”

  “Tonight?” asked Lirael, in a very small voice.

  “Tonight,” confirmed the Dog. “At the stroke of midnight, when all such adventures should begin, you will enter the Chief Librarian’s room. The sword is on the left, past the wardrobe, which is strangely full of black waistcoats. If all goes well, you will be able to return it before the dawn.”

  “If all goes well,” repeated Lirael somberly, remembering the silver fire in the Stilken’s eyes, and those terrible hooks. “Do you . . . do you think I should leave a note, in case . . . in case all does not go well?”

  “Yes,” said the Dog, removing the last small shred of Lirael’s self-confidence. “Yes. That would be a very good idea.”

  Excerpt from Terciel & Elinor

  Prologue

  THE FIG TREE was ancient and huge, its lower trunk buttressed by enormous roots that rose out of the lawn around it like the fins of some vast subterranean creature, while its upper branches topped out at two hundred feet, a full hundred feet higher than even the red-roofed tower of the Abhorsen’s House nearby.

  A boy, perhaps eight years old, brown-skinned, dark-haired, thin in the face and everywhere else from lack of food, was climbing swiftly up through the branches of the fig with fierce determination. He was wearing ragged, many-times-repaired breeches and a new linen shirt, far too large for him, that had been cinched in the middle with a silk scarf, also new, to make a kind of tunic, and his bare feet were extremely dirty.

  It was very quiet in and around the tree, but the boy climbed in a frenzy, as if he was pursued. Several times he almost lost his grip or footing, but he didn’t slow or falter. Finally, as he neared the top and the branches became slimmer and began to bend and creak, he slowed down. Soon after, reaching a point some twenty or thirty paces short of the crown, he stopped and straddled a horizontal branch, setting his thin shoulders against the gnarled trunk of the mighty tree.

  He couldn’t see much from his vantage point; the leaves were too thick around him. But there were a few spots where the foliage thinned. Through these gaps he could catch a glimpse of the red-roofed tower house below and the white limestone walls that surrounded the island it was built on, an island in the middle of a broad, fast-rushing river that only a few hundred yards to the south plunged over a massive waterfall.

  The boy stared at the mist rising along the line of the cliffs, marveling again at the quiet, the roar of the falls held back from the island by magic, or so he supposed. It had been noisy enough on the riverbank, and almost deafening when the old woman had jumped across the stepping stones with him on her back, gripping her so hard around the neck she’d told him crossly to stop choking her or they would both die.

  The old woman. She’d told him she was his great-aunt, but he didn’t think that could be true. She’d said that to the beadle at the workhouse in Grynhold, and the mayor, so they would let him go, but they wouldn’t have stopped her anyway. They were all bowing and begging her pardon and asking if she wanted wine or oysters or cake or anything at all the town might give her.

  But all she had wanted was him, and they had been happy to hand him over. No one had asked what he wanted.

  There was a rustle higher above, and a crunching, snapping sound. For a moment the boy thought it was a branch breaking, but the sound went on too long. A continuous crunching noise. He stood up and parted the branches immediately above him. All the boy saw was glaring green, elongated eyes and a broad open mouth full of very sharp white teeth.

  He flinched, lost his footing, and almost fell, but sacrificing skin, he managed to keep his grip on the higher branches. He swung there for a heart-stopping second before he scrabbled his feet back onto a thicker, lower branch.

  Branches creaked above, as if suddenly bearing more weight, and the foliage moved so Terciel got a proper look at what was above him. He was surprised to see it was a man, or sort of a man, because his first, half-seen impression was of something smaller. That said, this man was no taller than Terciel, albeit much broader across the shoulders. He had an odd pinkish nose and there was that hideous, many-toothed mouth, and the huge emerald eyes. Adding to his strangeness, his skin was entirely covered in fine, very white fur or down, which grew longer on his head and chin to give the appearance of hair and a beard. He had been eating fig-bird chicks out of a nest, crunching their tiny bones. There was a feather in the corner of his mouth and a single drop of blood on his broad white chest.

  A red leather collar was fastened tight around his neck, a collar that swarmed with Charter marks to make some sort of spell, and a tiny silver bell hung from the collar. The boy could see the clapper swing inside, but it made no sound, at least not one that he could hear.

  “So,” said whatever this thing was, spitting out the feather. His voice was that of a grown man, and sardonic. “You’re her new one.”

  The boy crouched lower on the branch, ready to drop down to the next branch below, to climb down as fast or even faster than he had climbed up.

  “Don’t fret,” said the creature. “You’re safe enough from me.”

  “What are you?” asked the boy nervously. He had one foot on the branch below, but he stayed where he was. For the moment. “I mean who? Sir.”

  “Many things once,” said the stranger, yawning. His teeth were even longer and sharper than they had seemed at first, and there were more of them. “I am a servant of the Abhorsens. Or to be more accurate, a slave. I have had many names. Your mistress calls me Moregrim.”

  “The Abhorsen. Her, down there,” said the boy, frowning. He gestured at the house. She’d taken him inside as soon as they arrived and handed him over to two strange magical servants she called Sendings. They were like daytime ghosts, their skin and eyes and hair and everything all Charter marks, uncountable tiny marks in different colors, swarming and crawling about to create the illusion of living people. The Sendings had tried to give him a bath but he’d managed to escape and climb the tree.

  “Yes indeed,” replied the dwarf, his green eyes sparkling with mischief. “Her down there is the current Abhorsen, and you, I presume, are her latest Abhorsen-in-Waiting. Terciel, that’s your name, isn’t it?”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I listen at doors,” said Moregrim blithely. “And windows. Both the real and the metaphorical.”

  Terciel frowned again, not understanding what the strange creature was talking about.

  “Tell me,” said the dwarf idly, not even looking at the boy. “Have you wielded the bells yet? Touched the handles? Worn the bandolier at least?”

  “What?” asked Terciel. He still wasn’t sure whether to flee down the tree or not. He had climbed it with the idea of hiding there until nightfall, and then trying to escape this island, but with this magical slave of the Abhorsen’s here, that plan had already failed. He looked around, wondering if there was somewhere else he could hide. Apart from the main house and its immediate gardens, there was an orchard, and lawns, and a strange little house or shed to the south, but nowhere that would offer safety from a search.

  He tried not to think even farther ahead, to how he might cross the river, so swift, with the vast falls so close. The stepping-stones were too far apart for him to jump. Maybe there was a boat. He was good with boats, a true child of the fishing port of Grynhold. Launched from the northern end of the island, where the current would be weaker, maybe—

  “Have you wielded the bells?”

  The bells.

  The sudden change in Terciel’s admittedly already difficult life had started with the appearance of seven bells in a bandolier. One moment they had not been there, and then there they were, in Terciel’s most secret eyrie in between the chimney stacks on the roof of the Grynhold Fish Hall. He’d been steeping a stolen piece of salt fish in a rain bucket, heard something strange, and looked away for less than
a second. When he looked back, there was the bandolier, with the mahogany bell handles sticking out of the pouches that kept the bells silent, the handles and the leather crawling all over with glowing Charter marks, which slowly faded from too-bright brilliance as he watched, though they remained visible.

  Terciel had left the bells and his fish, departing across the rooftop in a great rush that set the roosting gulls flying. Despite having the forehead Charter mark himself, he had never been taught magic, since he was an orphan of no account, merely a line in the register of the Grynhold Workhouse, an annoyance to the beadle who oversaw the children there, and nothing more than that to anyone else. His parents, who might have taught him Charter magic, had drowned when he was two, and his much older sister, Rahi, who had looked after him for a while afterward, had disappeared before he was four. Or thereabouts. He had no memory of his parents at all, and only a vague recollection of his sister.

  Everything he knew about them came from rare answered questions or from overhearing people talk about him, which happened even less frequently. Mostly he was ignored, apart from a cuff to speed him out of the workhouse to the oakum-picking shed, or a cuff to get him back in again at the end of the day, with an occasional caning thrown in if his absence from the daily work was noticed.

  All Terciel knew about magic was that the old healer Maralide made Charter marks appear from nowhere, sketching them in the air and on broken skin and bone, and sometimes they healed a hurt or cured a sickness, and sometimes they didn’t. And what Terciel knew about magical bells came only from stories whispered at night in the workhouse dormitory, whispers backstopped by the constant gurgle of the north aqueduct close by, whose swift running water kept the town safe from the marauding Dead, terrible creatures who were brought back into the living world by awful necromancers who used magical bells.