by Garth Nix
Seven bells, carried in a bandolier, worn across the chest.
Three days after the bells had appeared in Terciel’s eyrie, the old woman had arrived in Grynhold, and shortly after that Terciel had been called to the beadle’s office and then when he had fled instead, since he had numerous petty crimes of fish theft and other misdemeanors that might have come to light, he had been apprehended by an unprecedented collegiate effort on the part of the beadle and her associates, the Grynhold Town Watch, and a large number of fisher-folk who were ashore waiting for the tide to turn before they went out again. It was the last group that had soured Terciel’s attempted escape. The fisher-folk had never bothered the boy before, and he had been hiding among the drying nets.
They had dragged him before the old woman, and he had met her piercing black eyes, seen her horrendously white face, so much paler than anyone’s ever should be, and then he had looked down to the seven bells she wore in a bandolier across her chest, over an armored coat of unusual design, made of many small interlocking plates, several scored with the mark of weapons that had failed to penetrate.
Terciel had screamed when he saw the bells, and it had taken the combined effort of the mayor, the beadle, and the woman herself to convince him that she was not a necromancer come to steal his life and use his dead body for some terrible unspecified purpose. They’d explained that bells with Charter marks were special, not the usual necromancer’s tools, and they also were not the same seven bells that had appeared in his eyrie.
Those bells had come to him specially, the woman said, and it meant he had to go and get them and then he would have to come away with her. That was when she had said she was his great-aunt and her name was Tizanael, and he could call her “Aunt Tizzy.”
Terciel had noticed everyone else called her “Abhorsen,” and bowed low, something the free fishers of Grynhold didn’t do for anyone else.
With the fisher-folk turned against him, there was nowhere Terciel could hide. He’d climbed the fish hall and carefully picked up the bandolier by the very end of one strap, carried the bells down, and handed them over to the Abhorsen. She said she would keep them until his training began, when they got to the “House,” wherever that was. They’d left soon after, walking out under the aqueduct in the late afternoon, something that filled Terciel with terror. To go beyond the safety of running water, with the night coming on?
But nothing had happened, then or in the next three days and nights. After a while it occurred to Terciel that this was because he was traveling with someone the creatures of the night were afraid of themselves. He wanted to run away but dared not try anything, not when she was so close.
Now he was trapped here, on this island on the edge of a waterfall, and he didn’t know what to do.
Moregrim asked the question again, but Terciel didn’t answer.
“Could you take my collar off? It itches.”
Terciel shook his head slowly. He hadn’t touched the bells and he wasn’t going to touch a collar with all those marks glowing and floating upon it, not least when he didn’t know what this creature was.
The strange man slid along the branch above on all fours, a curiously nimble movement. Terciel noted his fingers were very stubby and ended in claws and were covered in the same short white hair that was all over his body. He also appeared to have a vestigial tail.
“Take off my collar!”
Terciel lowered himself to the branch below, and then the next, climbing down as rapidly as he ever had to escape the workhouse, with the beadle shouting at him from the window above.
There was shouting here too, but it came from below.
“Come down at once!”
“I am coming down!” he shouted back. He could see her now, on the lawn below the tree, one hand raised in a beckoning motion. For a second he thought there was a bright star on her finger, before he saw it was the afternoon sun catching the ring she wore at the right angle to make it flash.
“Not you!” called Tizanael, the fifty-first Abhorsen in a line that stretched back over centuries to the very first, whose name had become synonymous with the office. “Him! Come down at once!”
A white form leapt past Terciel, too close for comfort, gripped a branch with those taloned hands and swung down farther, switchbacking down the branches in swinging falls and crouching leaps, the blocky body moving with incongruous mobility. The boy followed more slowly, losing sight of both the creature and Tizzy as he entered the denser foliage of the lower branches.
When he finally reached the ground, the dwarf was kneeling in front of Tizanael, his head tilted at a very inhuman angle that obviously was no discomfort. The Abhorsen no longer wore the armor, bell bandolier, and sword, but a robe of dark blue embroidered with a multitude of tiny silver keys, a golden rope in place of a belt, with a small dagger in a metal sheath at her hip. She held her left hand high, the silver ring on her finger still catching the afternoon sun.
“You were forbidden to leave the house, Moregrim.”
“This whole island is often termed the ‘House,’” said the dwarf with a yawn. “I thought that was what you meant.”
“I meant the structure to my left,” said Tizanael shortly. “I will now be more specific. You are to remain within the walls of the building I am indicating until I give you leave otherwise.”
She pointed at the whitewashed, red-roofed house with its sky-blue door and the door knocker in the shape of a lion’s head, a ring held in its jaws.
“I also did not give you leave to change your shape,” added Tizanael. “Whether for the purpose of climbing trees or anything else.”
Moregrim emitted a high-pitched hissing noise and stood up. For a moment Terciel thought the strange, short man was going to attack Tizanael, but instead he bowed low. As he straightened up, he changed, suddenly more humanlike. Now his skin was as pale as the Abhorsen’s, his hair and beard were no longer fur-like, though still luminously white, and he was clothed in a shapeless white smock. The collar that had been around his neck had become a broader red leather belt hitched around his waist, and the small bell swung inside a large bronze buckle. The vestigial tail had entirely disappeared.
Moregrim bowed, turned away, and headed not toward the front door of the house but to an open gate in the wall on the right-hand side, which led to the kitchen garden. When he was about ten paces away, he turned and snarled, green eyes directed piercingly at Terciel.
“She killed Rahiniel!”
Tizanael raised her hand. She did not do anything Terciel could see, but Moregrim writhed and fell over his own feet, rolled twice, and yowled exactly like the cats that frequented the Grynhold Fish Hall, before he got up again and stumbled away through the garden gate.
Tizanael turned to look at Terciel. Her face, as ever, was set. Not angry or antagonistic, like the beadle’s so often was. This was simply an absence of emotion. Terciel had no idea what she was feeling or thinking.
“Who’s Rahiniel?” he asked.
“Your sister,” said Tizanael, watching him carefully. “I believe she was generally known as Rahi.”
“Rahi?”
Terciel took in a slow breath. He could almost remember Rahi. At least, he had the faint recollection of someone wrapping him up in a blanket and kissing his forehead as hail clattered on the roof. It had been cozy and warm, so not the workhouse. That was more likely to have been Rahi than his mother. He had been too little when his parents died to remember anything of them.
But that was his only memory. She had left, and he had always presumed she was dead anyway. What did it matter how she died?
“I did not kill her,” said Tizanael. “She was my Abhorsen-in-Waiting. It is a dangerous office we hold, and she did not survive one of the many tests we face.”
“That man, or whatever he is, Moregrim. He wanted me to take off his collar.”
“You would not have been able to,” said Tizanael. “Not yet. But Moregrim lays his plans long ahead. For now, simply remember that if
you take off his collar, he will kill you.”
Terciel shrugged, attempting to show he wasn’t scared. But he was, and they both knew it.
“You are to be my new Abhorsen-in-Waiting,” said Tizanael. “That is why the bells came to you.”
“Why me?” asked Terciel.
Tizanael did not immediately answer. Terciel shifted, lifting his heels nervously, as she continued to look at him, gaze unblinking.
“It is a very difficult thing to be the Abhorsen,” she said finally. “Many different strengths are needed. These tend to occur more frequently in those descended from the first Abhorsen, who was given many gifts by her . . . mother . . . you might say. So the bells often choose one of that line, however distant. Like your sister, Rahiniel, and now you.”
“You’re not my aunt,” said Terciel defiantly. He didn’t really understand what she was going on about.
“No,” replied Tizanael. “I am your great-great-aunt. You have something of the look of my brother, Herranael, your great-grandfather.”
“Where’s he, then?”
“He is dead,” replied the Abhorsen. “They are all dead now, of that line, save you.”
Her expression didn’t change, nor her tone of voice. She might have been speaking of the weather, or the time of day.
Terciel scowled, and scuffed the dirt with his heel.
“Did they drown?” he asked. His parents had drowned. Most of the orphans in the workhouse had lost their family to the sea.
“No,” replied Tizanael.
“Everyone dies,” said Terciel.
“Yes,” said Tizanael. “In the right time. And it is my task . . . our task . . . to make sure they stay dead.”
“How?” asked Terciel. He felt suddenly tired, and hungry, and overwhelmed by all things he didn’t understand. His entire world had changed, and it seemed unlikely to be for the better, even though his old life had been bad enough.
“I will teach you,” said Tizanael. “But first, you must bathe, and put on clean clothes, and then we will eat a proper dinner. No more travel bread and water.”
“Salt fish?” asked Terciel.
Tizanael shuddered, the first time he had seen any kind of human expression pass over her statue-like mask of a face.
“Definitely not salt fish,” she said.
Terciel nodded, and walked ahead of her back to the blue door with the lion knocker. It was that simple reaction that convinced him there was hope in this new life after all.
He was so tired of eating salt fish.
Chapter One
THE HUGE GREENHOUSE that generations before had been used to raise bountiful crops of flowers and prize marrows had been remade into a theater of sorts when Elinor was nine years old, and constantly improved since then. Now that she was nineteen, the dolls that had once provided her supporting cast had long since been relegated to become the audience, seated in two rows of garden chairs at the south end. They had been replaced as performers by life-size plasterboard cutouts, repainted as necessary. Elinor still played nearly all the parts and did all the voices.
She was doing one now, standing behind a bright red-and-gold cavalier to deliver the most famous speech from Breakespear’s The Three Noble Kinswomen, Sir Merivan revealing he was betrothed to all three ladies but would marry none and was in fact in love with the orphan Kit Catchpenny.
“None of thee could but be more than a sister unto me—”
“Elinor!”
The agitated voice of Mrs. Watkins preceded her into the glasshouse, the tone unusual enough to wake Ham Corbin, who had fallen asleep among the audience, despite Elinor’s rousing performance over the last hour as the entire cast of the Breakespear classic. He was eighty, so Elinor did not take it as a criticism. Besides, he had been primarily a circus performer, and loved only the parts of plays that called for tumbling and swordplay and knife-throwing, all of which he had taught her since he had first come to Coldhallow House, ostensibly as an elderly and thus inexpensive groom but in fact more of an unlikely assistant and sometime foil to his niece, Roberta—though like everyone else, he only ever called Elinor’s governess “Mrs. Watkins.”
Elinor sighed and let the rest of Sir Merivan’s soliloquy subside back into the lower reaches of her mind. She stepped out from behind the cavalier cutout, revealing herself to be a full head shorter than the knight, as she stood no more than five foot three in her stockings, or as was the case now, in socks. She was wearing her long-dead father’s clothes, a subdued tweed suit in brown and green, which matched her eyes. They were brown with flecks of green, and her hair was simply brown, a very undistinguished brown to her own eyes. The suit had been altered somewhat to fit but was still baggy. Her father had been no taller than her, but considerably weightier and notoriously slow-moving. Elinor was slim, strong, swift, and dexterous, and Ham had said she was the physical equal of any of the circus folk he had worked with, though he qualified this by adding she was not as strong as “Helena, the Strongest Woman in the World” nor as flexible as a contortionist known as the “Mirror Snake.”
She looked a drab sparrow among the bright cutouts, Elinor thought, not for the first time. But even though she played all the parts, she never dressed as the flamboyant characters in her favorite dramas. She wore her father’s old clothes simply because they were more comfortable and it was much easier to do all the things she liked doing in trousers rather than in an ankle-length dress and a tightly buttoned jacket, not to mention several layers of flannel underclothing.
It had been a tactical error to step out from hiding, Elinor realized, as Mrs. Watkins saw she was once again wearing her father’s clothes, with a cloth clap pulled down low over her forehead to hide the unsightly brand there, rather than a bonnet or even a scarf.
“Elinor! You have to get dressed. The doctor is here.”
“I thought he was coming tomorrow,” protested Elinor.
“The pony trap from the station is halfway up the drive! It must be bringing the doctor,” exclaimed Mrs. Watkins. “Hurry! Oh, Ham, not now!”
Ham ignored his niece, throwing four wooden balls in quick succession at Elinor, who caught them automatically and began to juggle, cycling the balls around in front of her face before she threw them back with great speed and accuracy straight at Ham’s nose.
He caught the balls with a coughing chuckle and slipped them back into the pockets of his shabby greatcoat. Though it was the tail end of summer and the days still had some warmth, and the greenhouse with its iron-framed glass roof caught the sun, Ham had begun to feel the cold. Great age had not so far lessened his dexterity, but it had reduced his resistance to extremes of temperature.
“You’ve the sure eye, Miss Elinor,” he said. “Knives next time.”
“You’ll do no such thing,” scolded Mrs. Watkins, though she knew full well her uncle would pay her no heed, and that Elinor had been juggling knives for years anyway. Though not usually when Mrs. Watkins could see, to spare her feelings. “Come on, Elinor. I have put out your Sunday dress and the blue bonnet.”
Elinor hooked her arm through Mrs. Watkins’s elbow as they left the greenhouse, and gave her a fond smile.
“What would I do without you, Mrs. Watkins?”
The governess sniffed.
“Become even more of a hellion,” she said.
“I wish I was a hellion,” said Elinor sadly. “Wearing men’s clothes and staging plays all by myself hardly counts.”
“It would be more than enough if word spread of it,” snapped Mrs. Watkins. She was almost dragging Elinor across the courtyard between the greenhouse and the main house now, in her eagerness to get her out of sight before their visitor might see her, though the doctor would come to the front door on the other side.
“How could it?” asked Elinor. She paused, forcing Mrs. Watkins to release her arm. “No one ever visits. I never go out.”
She gestured at the hills around them, good grazing land for sheep, though there had been none there for year
s and the once well-managed woods on the heights had begun to encroach upon the fields. Elinor’s father, the late Edmund Hallett, had been a very indifferent farmer anyway, and since his death eight years before, Elinor’s mother, Amelia, had let everything go: the land lay fallow, all the farmworkers and most of the servants had gone, and no social calls were made or allowed.
Now Amelia Hallett herself lay close to death, up on the four-poster bed in the grand bedroom that took up a good quarter of the old house’s second floor. Elinor looked up at the windows there, even now half expecting to see her mother peering down at her, the same distant figure she had always been, leaving Elinor’s education and well-being almost entirely to Mrs. Watkins, intervening only in usually unwelcome ways on those rare occasions when she roused herself to leave the bedroom or parlor.
Mrs. Hallett had taken to her bed three weeks previously, after feeling “light-headed and odd” and had thereafter quickly lapsed into a state closely resembling death, while not actually being dead. The local doctor having proclaimed himself entirely baffled, he had suggested telegraphing the famous Dr. Branthill, and that worthy had eventually agreed to make a visit.
Though Mrs. Hallett was not in the window, a sudden and miraculous recovery not having occurred, Elinor kept staring up. The weather vane atop the house was screeching as it slowly rotated, the screech almost seeming to come from the bronze owl that sat atop the directionals. The winds were extremely set in their ways here, usually coming from the south or southeast. The weather vane rarely moved much, if at all.
Now it had swung all the way around, and the arrow clutched in the bronze owl’s claws was pointing north.
“A wind from the north,” said Elinor softly, almost to herself.
“What’s that?” asked Mrs. Watkins. She looked up too, and gasped. “No, that can’t be—”
The weather vane screeched and moved again, slowly circling around to point in a more accustomed direction to the southeast. But it didn’t stay still, jerking northward for a few seconds before swinging back, as if the wind from the north was simply waiting its turn.
