The Left-Handed Booksellers of London

by Garth Nix

  “What about you?” asked Susan anxiously. She started to pull Merlin’s trousers up to see how bad the breaks were, but he stopped her, holding her wrists.

  “Both legs broken,” he said, grimacing. “Spiral fractures. Very bad.”

  “The Sipper spit . . .”

  “Can’t mend broken bones . . . not quickly,” said Merlin. He was breathing in short pants, obviously in extreme pain. He pulled the Smython out of his bag and held it out butt first. “Take my revolver. I see your salt-bloodied knife is better than a sword against the Cauldron-Born. You have to distract Southaw—”

  “But—”

  “You can . . . do . . . what you did to that . . . one.”

  “But how will I even know what Southaw—”

  “The Totteridge Yew,” gasped Merlin. “His locus is a tree! It will be clear to you, and he’ll be with the cauldron. Head for that.”

  “But what do I do?” asked Susan.

  “I don’t know! Shoot the tree, chop branches off with the knife, anything to take his attention away from the contest of wills,” croaked Merlin. “I’ll follow, but crawling . . . there isn’t time! You’re our only chance.”

  Susan hesitated for an instant before leaning in to kiss Merlin full on the mouth. He lifted his shaking right hand and ran his fingers across the stubble on her head. They held the kiss for an electric second, before both slowly broke away.

  “Stay alive,” whispered Merlin.

  “You too,” said Susan. If they lived, she knew there would be much more than a single date in their shared future.

  If they lived.

  She grabbed the revolver, hefted her knife, turned, and walked swiftly into the fog. She knew exactly where the Copper Cauldron was, and she headed straight to it.

  Merlin looked at Vivien again, took a knife out of his sleeve, and sat up, grunting with the pain. He bent forward and slit his trousers from the knees, inspecting his fractured legs. With his steady left hand he drew out a vial of Sipper blood, swished it in his mouth, and spat it on his left leg where a piece of twisted bone protruded through the skin. He let it pool there, then settled his left hand on the bone and with one quick motion pushed it back in place—and fainted.

  Susan did not look behind her. She walked as straight as she could towards the cauldron. She could sense its location. It wasn’t far away, but the fog was still so thick she couldn’t see anything but the field a few yards in front of her. The grass was higher here, strewn with stones, a natural clearing rather than the work even of primitive agriculture. Southaw had indeed removed his demesne to some ancient part of England, far back in time.

  Susan readied her knife, every nerve on edge, ready for a sudden attack by a Cauldron-Born, be it human, bear, or whatever. But before she’d taken a few steps, she realized this would not work. She couldn’t creep around the fog, fearing attack.

  Merlin had said to distract Southaw. To do that, she had to get his attention, not skulk herself.

  Susan walked faster and filled her lungs to shout as loudly as she could.

  “Hey, Southaw or Holly or whatever you want to call yourself! Shithead! I’m coming for my cauldron! Yes, that’s right! My cauldron! MY CAULDRON!”

  Her words had an immediate effect. The fog swirled and thinned, visibility increasing enormously. Modern noises suddenly filtered in, though distant. The sound of sirens, far away, and a helicopter. Both faded away again almost at once, but the fog did not return.

  Faint sunshine lit up the stony field, its light soaked up by the darkness of the ancient forest that clustered around the open space. A hundred yards in front of her, Susan saw a single, lonely tree. A yew already ancient even in this place, a cracked and gnarly thing with a massive yellowish bole that rose only three or four feet before splitting into five subsidiary trunks that rose up thirty feet. Its branches spread wide, thick with poisonous leaves and berries.

  Somewhere below this yew, in a hollow between the roots, lay the Copper Cauldron. A vast bowl of hammered metal, six inches thick, big enough to hold and cook an ox, each of its three squat legs the size of Susan’s torso. The metal shone with internal light, but the interior of the cauldron was darker than any night, defying all mortal sight.

  Susan broke into a run, screaming words she didn’t even know, some ancient war cry of her father’s that had come into her head. At fifty yards she stopped to fire at the tree, but the revolver almost bucked out of her hand and the shot went wild.

  But the boom of the gun did distract Southaw from his unseen struggle with the booksellers who were trying to reel him back into the flow of time. The sounds of the New World broke in again, louder and closer. Susan saw it now, like a mirage superimposed on what was already there, a blurry, double-vision view of a modern road cutting across the stony field ahead of her, a church rising up behind the yew, big expensive houses with well-clipped hedges shimmering into existence to her left and right.

  There were people, too, ghostly, blurred figures. She knew they were booksellers from the blobs of bright silver that marked their hands. There were lots of them gathered in a ring around the ancient yew, like the goblins who’d danced her to the May Fair. There were even more booksellers behind them, left-handed ones with shadowy weapons, abstract lines in place of swords and axes. Susan heard Una’s commanding voice, but far off, as if carried by the wind from some distant place. But there was no wind here; the air was still and wet, even though the fog had gone.

  Roads, buildings, and booksellers were not yet real in this place, and might never be, if Southaw won the contest of wills. Susan stopped and held the revolver tighter, firing at the tree again, four more times, until the gun was empty. She thought she hit it, but Southaw was not distracted again.

  The New World faded out again. Susan screamed in anger and ran forward, lifting her little knife high. She wanted to hurt Southaw, punish him for everything he had done. He had enslaved her father, ruined Jassmine’s life, killed Merlin’s and Vivien’s mother—

  No Cauldron-Born rose to stop her, no sudden flight of starlings. For a few moments a sense of exaltation filled Susan; she would reach the tree and hack at the branches with her knife . . . the sharpened butter knife. . . .

  But what would that do? Shooting at it hadn’t achieved anything. She already knew she couldn’t bind Southaw, not with salt and steel and blood.

  She didn’t need to hurt Southaw. She needed to distract him. Make him fight a battle of wills with her as well as the booksellers.

  Susan stopped, and raised her hands, once again taking in a deep breath.

  “The Copper Cauldron is mine own! I call upon its powers and deny them to all others!”

  A flash of bright copper-red light from beneath the tree answered her words. She felt a sudden giddy influx of power, only for second, before the harsh will of Southaw shut her off from it. It was not enough for her to simply claim the cauldron. It would take more than that.

  The Ancient Sovereign responded in another way as well. The tree moved, a great root tearing out of the earth, or so it seemed. Susan slowed and blinked. It was not the physical tree that moved, the thing of branch and leaf and bark. It was as if the shadow of the tree was leaving it. But this was no shadow, it was a thing of that same intensely dense, gray, and greasy smoke she’d seen become a raven atop the Old Man of Coniston.

  It was the spirit of the tree, the essence of Southaw.

  Another shadowy root came free of the earth, and another, and a smoky duplicate left the actual tree, branches stretching out like grasping arms. The whorls and fissures of the physical tree were in this thing huge pupil-less yellow eyes, and the rotting crack in the bole became a gulping maw that opened and shut and ground splintered teeth together in exasperation at its challenger.

  Southaw stalked towards Susan, growing taller as he came, now a fifty-foot-tall creature of dense malevolence. The real tree behind it seemed tiny now, ordinary and merely old, no longer imbued with power.

  But Southaw’s g
rip on his demesne did not waver. There was no hint of the New World, no faint vision of road or church or people.

  “What does it take,” groaned Susan, watching the apparition stalk towards her, her mind momentarily blank with fear. If she couldn’t distract Southaw . . .

  Bright light flashed again from the Copper Cauldron, like a beacon calling to her. She could see in her mind’s eye, nestled in an earthy chamber beneath the physical yew, half-buried in the humus from the tree’s dropped bark and needles decomposing over time.

  Susan turned and ran, not directly away from Southaw, but at a right angle. The huge shadow tree turned to follow, moving fast, many great roots propelling it like a centipede, sending it scuttling over the ground faster than Susan could run. Its leading branches reached out fifty or sixty feet ahead, all too like a spider’s forelegs, the ends curling and snatching at the air, as they would snatch at her in a very few seconds.

  Susan turned again and raced for the copper-red glint. Southaw turned, too, not so swift as in a straight line, but he was already too close behind. She could hear his branches whipping the air, the roots ripping earth and stone, that smoky shadow-stuff not insubstantial at all, not here.

  She would only have seconds with the cauldron, even if she got there first.

  Merlin, dragging himself in agony across the field, saw Susan running, saw the monstrous spirit tree looming close behind her. He felt a faint spark of hope leap inside as he saw Southaw was finally distracted. The New World was swimming into view, coming into focus, distant sound and wavering ghost shapes more concrete by the moment. But it was not fast enough, not fast enough by far; and Merlin cried out and tried to crawl faster as he caught the flash of light from the cauldron and saw Southaw so close, and Susan so near, and he realized what she would have to do, that he had told her himself.

  If a living person is entirely immersed in the cauldron, it will shatter, its power gone forever. Oh, and the person dies.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  To stand on a pivot; balanced, true

  Awaiting the drop of the other shoe

  A shining moment, before you fall

  All things must end, but is this all?

  SUSAN REACHED THE YEW WITH SOUTHAW’S QUESTING BRANCHES so close, so close behind. There was no time to consider, no time for second thoughts, no time to slow down. She felt the slash of a sharp-edged branch across her back and threw herself forward, slamming into the raw earth, sliding across and down into the cavern beneath the roots of the yew, falling in a cascade of dirt straight down—

  Into the waiting mouth of the Copper Cauldron.

  It was like diving into light, wondrous golden light, which enveloped Susan and took her in, Southaw too slow to catch her at the last.

  A hundred yards away, Merlin saw Susan’s dive. He saw the Old One lunge forward, massive branches of smoke and shadow thrashing at the earth, only to rear back with a shriek like a locomotive’s locked wheels sliding into disaster, a scream of total rage.

  The New World in the shape of the charming village of Totteridge rushed in to replace the Old, an unstoppable tide of color and sound and movement. Sunshine burst through the clouds, swaths of light sweeping down. The A5109 solidified in place, with flashing blue lights to north and south indicating the police roadblocks that had cut off all traffic.

  On the west side of the road, huge, expensive houses rose, bordered with tall hedges to shield themselves from the passing poor. To the east a church appeared, a seventeenth- or eighteenth-century construction of dull yellow-brown brick topped by an incongruous white tower. A surprisingly low paling fence rose up around the churchyard, entered at a 1930s lych-gate, with its low peaked roof. Gravestones peppered the churchyard, amidst lesser trees.

  In the middle of the churchyard, there was the Totteridge Yew.

  A circle of thirty right-handed and six even-handed booksellers closed in on the physical yew tree and the raging tree monster that was Southaw, who loomed high above it. The booksellers all wore blue boiler suits, and the ugly bulbous-toed steel-capped boots that in other times would have made Merlin wince. Their silver hands were ungloved and bright, and like the goblins of May Fair, they formed a handfast ring.

  Without any audible command, the booksellers suddenly stepped forward, boots crashing down as one, like the guards at Buckingham Palace. The ring drew tighter, closer to the tree.

  Southaw lashed at them, long branches whipping down. But his threshing blows had no force; his smoky essence lost solidity wherever it struck, dissipating into puffs of gray dust like seeds blown from polluted dandelions.

  With every blow the monstrous spirit tree became smaller and weaker, shrinking back down towards the physical yew. Again, without a word, the booksellers stepped forward, the ring tightening once more. The essence of Southaw retreated fully inside the actual tree, but it could still be seen, tree and spirit like a badly registered printing, the lines of trunk and tree and leaves smudged with gray fuzziness.

  Some of the booksellers in the ring began to sing. Their voices were soft and musical, but barely more than a whisper. The words of banishment, which Merlin had learned at school but never heard in earnest. More booksellers joined in, two lines behind. Then the last group joined, also two lines behind, the song sung as a round by the three groups, each composed of a dozen booksellers, ten right-handed and two even-handed.

  Dream not, thou shade

  O’er an eternal night

  Wake not, but sleep

  In slow time’s creep

  Fight not, lie down

  Abjure all and thy crown

  Rise not, save at our behest

  Sleep deep, go to thy rest

  Sleep sound, Old One

  Thy reign is done

  Rest now, sleep fast

  Thy time is past

  As the booksellers in the ring sang Southaw away, forty left-handed booksellers, also wearing boiler suits and boots, worked in quartets to chop up remnant Cauldron-Born with various bladed weapons. One even had something that resembled the classic grim reaper’s scythe. They were collecting the pieces in draw-stringed cotton library bags that shared a common “Wooten Library” embroidered patch along with many individual designs exhibiting the wildly variant levels of sewing expertise from several generations of St. Jacques children.

  Southaw had deployed more than a dozen of the Cauldron-Born to defend the perimeter of his village lair, but had lost control when he took the demesne out of time. They had turned on whoever was closest, including each other, and some were still locked together, gnawing and tearing at decayed flesh, until the booksellers’ blades chopped them into little bits.

  “Where’s Susan?”

  Merlin was lying facedown on the grass. He rolled over and looked up, grimacing as the movement sent stabs of pain shooting through his broken legs. The sun was behind Vivien, and he squinted at her. Her chin was covered in blood from her lip, but she was smiling.

  “She went in the cauldron,” said Merlin dully. “That’s what finished Southaw.”

  “That was clever!” said Vivien admiringly.

  Merlin gulped back a sob.

  “She went in the cauldron,” he repeated, choking on the words. “She broke it to save you and me and fix Southaw and all you can say is ‘That was clever’?”

  Vivien frowned and pointed to where the left-handed were chopping up Cauldron-Born.

  “If she broke the cauldron, why are there still Cauldron-Born flopping around?”

  Merlin stared at her, then over at the tree. The booksellers stood shoulder to shoulder now, close against the bole of the Totteridge Yew. The first group of singers fell silent, and then the second, and finally the third. The round was sung, the banishing done, and with the final word the last wisp of Southaw vanished from the tree. Now, perhaps forever, it was only a yew.

  Merlin and Vivien felt Southaw go, sent somewhere akin to that place of nothingness they had traversed to reach Silvermere.

  The ring of bo
oksellers broke apart, excited chatter spreading, with handshakes and embraces far more of relief than triumph. But at one spot, near the tree, several booksellers peered down into a hole lit by a faint copper-red glow. One of them called out to Una, who turned away from the Cauldron-Born she had been chopping up and marched over, her sword held ready in her silver hand.

  “Pick me up!” ordered Merlin. “Fireman’s carry! Get me over there now!”

  “Una’s not going to kill Susan,” chided Vivien. But she bent down and picked Merlin up, settling him across her shoulders. “But since this will get you to an ambulance quicker, I might as well.”

  “Do you really think she’s still alive?” asked Merlin. “Unchanged?”

  Vivien didn’t answer for a moment. Alive, she thought likely, given the cauldron had not shattered. Unchanged might be too much to ask.

  “I don’t know,” she said as gently as possible.

  Sirens got louder and closer, and a veritable parade of police vehicles roared in from north and south. At the same time Inspector Greene came running through the churchyard towards the yew, followed by half a dozen armed police officers in full tactical gear. Three of them carried old steel poleaxes, doubtless from the Tower of London, the others H & K MP5s.

  A vicar stepped out of the front door of the church as they ran by, and looked around in extreme puzzlement at all the blue-suited, silver-handed people with medieval weapons, and the armed police.

  “Go back inside, sir!” shouted Greene.

  “We charge for filming here!” retorted the indignant vicar. “And no one has asked for permission! This is sacrilege and a disgrace! I will call the actual police!”

  Greene pointed to one of her officers, who peeled off and took the vicar’s arm, taking him still protesting back into the church.

  Merlin and Vivien reached the yew a few seconds behind Una. But she sheathed her sword, and reached down to lift Susan up. Her face was smeared with dirt and she was holding her right wrist up high near her neck, but otherwise she appeared to be unharmed, and unchanged.

  “Put me down,” said Merlin, too much aware of how he looked like a flopping fish draped over Vivien’s shoulders. His sister lowered him more carefully than he deserved and helped him sit up against a tilted gravestone. Susan walked slowly towards him and sat down by his side.