To Hold the Bridge

by Garth Nix

  She and Francesca were barely inside the door when they heard the first scream, immediately followed by a police whistle, both coming from the direction of the Miriam Oakenwood Quadrangle. It was answered almost immediately by more whistles, coming from other parts of the College, and the air above.

  ‘Bill!’ exclaimed Francesca. She half turned to go back out the door, but Mari grabbed her sleeve.

  ‘No! The best way to help is to get that fragment!’

  Together, they ran through the New House to the eastern door that led straight into Mo’Wood. Mari fumbled the keys there, uncertain which one was needed. As she tried each key, more screams could be heard, and more whistles, and then a horrible sound that was more a sensation, as if the air around them had been sucked into a void.

  ‘Implosion,’ said Francesca. ‘Hurry up, Mari!’

  Mari’s hands shook as she tried the third key. It turned easily. With a cry of relief, she swung the door open. Francesca ran ahead of her and raced straight for the stairs, her wand held ready. Mari wrestled the key out and followed as quickly as she could.

  First-year students were peering out nervously through partially opened doors on the top floor as Mari and Francesca ran past.

  ‘Evacuate!’ shouted Mari. ‘Go to your assembly points! This one, Francesca!’

  Francesca had run past Englesham’s door. She skidded to a stop and turned back. Mari didn’t knock. She thrust in a key, turned it, and pushed the door open.

  Englesham must have been close up on the other side of the door, because now she was on her knees, awkwardly crouched on her very nice and expensive carpet, her hand going up toward a bleeding nose. Mari gripped her hard on the shoulders and looked around, ready for an attack.

  ‘Where’s the fragment?’ she shouted.

  Englesham started to cry, tears streaming from her eyes to mingle with the blood from her nose.

  ‘Where is it?’ Mari shouted again.

  Englesham pointed at the sleeve of her nightgown.

  Mari felt inside the elasticized wrist. Her fingers tingled as she felt the familiar magic of the fragment. She gripped it tightly and pulled it out.

  There was the sound of glass breaking and timber splintering in Englesham’s bedroom. Through the half-open door, Mari saw a shadow on the wall, the shadow of a witch throwing a shattered broomstick on the floor.

  Francesca saw it too and dashed across to slam the door shut. She began to trace the frame with her wand to seal it closed, but even as she did so, the door itself began to froth and bubble like whisked milk, and a terrible stench of decayed flesh filled the room. One of the bubbles popped, making a hole three inches in diameter. Through it, Mari saw a pallid hand holding the bone wand.

  ‘Leave it!’ screamed Mari. She let go of Englesham. ‘Everyone run!’

  The three of them were barely out of the room when the door exploded in a sickening gout of rancid matter, bits of it splattering into the hall beyond.

  Mari didn’t need to repeat her instruction. Englesham ran one way, and Francesca and Mari the other, back the way they’d come. Terrified undergraduates ran with them, and the two sizars had to fight their way through the crush to reach the connecting door to the New House, rather than out to the quadrangle.

  They ran through the New House without any thought for silence, heavy boots clattering on the polished wooden floors. There was still a great deal of screaming going on outside, though fewer whistles.

  ‘Almost there!’ called Mari as they burst out the other side, down the steps and into the Library Garden. ‘Get ready!’

  ‘Get ready for what?’ asked a cold voice that came from a tall, impeccably dressed witch who was just stepping off her hovering broom a dozen paces in front of the moondial.

  It was the Mistress of the College. Lady Aristhenia.

  ‘Something that must be done, ma’am,’ answered Mari carefully, as she slid to a halt, Francesca cannoning into her back.

  ‘Indeed?’ asked Lady Aristhenia. ‘I will be the judge of that. Ah, Helena. You have been hasty, I see.’

  Mari looked behind her. Helena Diadem was coming down the steps of the New House, the bone wand in her hand.

  ‘Let me finish them, Aunt,’ said Diadem. ‘Please!’

  Lady Aristhenia looked at her niece. It was not the look of a fond aunt, but rather that of someone who has found something displeasing in their morning porridge.

  ‘Where are the others?’

  Diadem gestured toward Mo’Wood. ‘Distracting the constabulary and the proctors,’ she said.

  ‘Who should not be here,’ replied Aristhenia. ‘And would not be, save for your foolishness. I told you not to use the wand before I needed it.’

  ‘I am the heiress, Aunt,’ replied Diadem stiffly. ‘The wand is mine to use.’

  ‘But you need me to tell you how to use it properly,’ snapped Aristhenia.

  Mari slid one foot forward as the two bickered, hoping they were sufficiently distracted to not notice. Francesca slithered a little to the side, her own wand slipping out of her sleeve into her hand.

  ‘I know how to use it,’ said Diadem. ‘It’s in my blood. You only married into the family—’

  ‘Don’t talk nonsense!’ barked Aristhenia. ‘We haven’t got time. The summoning must be made complete. Give me the wand.’

  ‘When I’ve done these two,’ said Diadem. She turned toward Francesca and raised the bone wand.

  In the fog above, the tower clock chimed the first of the twelve strokes of midnight.

  Mari screamed a word of power and threw the heavy bunch of keys at Diadem, at the same time diving toward the moondial. Francesca flung herself behind a rowan.

  Diadem’s curse struck the tree. Its leaves all fell at once, like a truckload of mulch being dumped, and the bark on its trunk curled and withered. Any lesser tree would have crumbled into dust, but the rowans of the Library Garden were ancient, and very strong.

  Even as the leaves fell, the bunch of keys hit Diadem on the face. One of them stuck there, the ensorcelled metal suddenly red-hot. The bane-witch screamed, dropped the wand, and tried to pull the burning key from her flesh.

  ‘Idiot!’ said Aristhenia. In two quick strides she was at Diadem’s side. She snatched up the wand from the ground and gestured with it. The key flew off the younger witch’s face, leaving a ghastly, burned brand on her cheek. Diadem fell to the ground, whimpering, little wisps of smoke still rising from her ruined face.

  Mari reached the hole she’d made. She stuffed the parchment in it and was about to open her mouth to speak the incantation when she was caught in the grip of a geas even more powerful than the one Diadem had used on her before.

  ‘Judicious application of power is to be preferred,’ said Aristhenia. She jerked the wand, and Mari found herself standing up as the tower clock struck for the third time. ‘The wand may prefer the traditional banecraft, with all its gore and foulness. I do not.’

  Mari couldn’t move anything except her eyes. She looked down at her wrist. Surely, Alicia Wasp’s bracelet would do something now to protect her from this dread magic?

  Aristhenia saw her looking and smiled.

  ‘It’s only a silver bracelet. Even if it was once owned by the fabled—’

  Whatever she was going to say was lost in the loud report of close gunshots, as Bill suddenly dropped down from the sky behind her, a flying cloak whipping around his shoulders, a service revolver in his hand. He fired three times, the first bullet silver, the second petrified wood, and the third lead reclaimed from the gutter of a house where wizards had lived for more than a hundred years.

  None of them had any effect. They went into and through Aristhenia, sure enough, and gaping wounds opened – but no blood came out. Instead a pale fire flickered behind the holes in her clothes.

  It was a very unwelcome sign that whatever was being summoned had already mostly arrived and taken up residence – inside the Mistress of the College.

  But the bullets did h
ave one small, positive side effect. As the clock struck its ninth, or possibly tenth, chime, Mari turned her head to listen and found she could move again.

  Aristhenia turned around toward Bill and raised the dreadful wand.

  ‘Run!’ screamed Francesca to Bill. She ran out from behind her tree and dived to the moondial, taking Mari’s outstretched hand. Bill’s cloak flapped as he leaped up into the air, even as Aristhenia’s curse flew like an arrow, passing a fingersbreadth beneath the silver hobnails on the soles of his size 11 police boots.

  Together, Mari and Francesca said the words. They were in Brythonic. In translation they said something like: ‘Rest you here, under the moon, if you wake it will be too soon.’

  The parchment sank into the earth and was gone. A fierce wind blew in across the College, wrapping up the fog and rolling it away. The bloody haze across the face of the moon vanished, wiped away by an unseen, cosmic hand.

  ‘Interfering brats!’ shrieked Aristhenia. She swiveled back toward Mari and Francesca, who were crouched by the moondial. In that second, all three of them were caught in the moment of the clock’s twelfth and final chime.

  The bone wand shivered in the Mistress’s hand. She spat out a sound, but the word faltered in her mouth and was never completed. Her fingers came unstrung, and the wand fell to the grass as the last echo of the chime faded into the night.

  The Original By-Laws were once again made naught, and the New By-Laws sprang back into force with renewed vigor.

  Lady Aristhenia looked down at herself and saw the blood gushing from the wounds in her chest and stomach. She took a step toward the moondial, crumpled forward, and fell facedown in front of the two trembling sizars.

  There was a flurry in the air above, and half a dozen proctors in flying cloaks plummeted down, silvered swords in hand. They were followed by a large, bearlike man in a red- and-gold dressing gown over blue striped pajamas that had the University coat of arms on the pocket, who was sitting in a well-upholstered armchair that landed with a heavy thump on the lawn. He was followed a moment later by Professor Aiken coming to a sliding stop on a broom.

  The Chancellor had a saucer and a cup of tea in one hand, with most of the tea slopped in the saucer, and he looked extremely irritated, until he saw the body of Lady Aristhenia and the bone wand lying near her lifeless body.

  ‘Hmmm. That old stick up to its tricks again,’ he muttered. He got out of his chair, handed his teacup to the air, where it stayed, and took a handkerchief out of his dressing gown pocket. He laid this over the bone wand, drew his own silver-inlaid ebony wand out of his sleeve, and tapped the handkerchief twice. When he picked up the handkerchief and stuffed it back in his pocket, the wand had vanished.

  ‘That’ll hold it till morning,’ he said. He touched the body of Lady Aristhenia with the toe of his dun-colored, fleece-lined slipper and sniffed. ‘Who did she invite in then?’

  ‘One of the dwellers of the most far regions,’ replied Professor Aiken, peering at the corpse through her half-moon glasses. ‘I suspect her niece will know which one. Fortunately it couldn’t manifest entirely, thanks to Miss Garridge and her friend restoring the New By-Laws.’

  ‘Mmm. Yes, well done, you two,’ said the Chancellor, smiling and nodding at Mari and Francesca. ‘Grand tradition of Mistress Wasp and all that. Expect nothing less from an Ermine sizar.’

  ‘You’d better take over here as temporary Mistress, Joan,’ he said to Professor Aiken. He indicated Diadem, who was curled up in a ball, pallid with shock, and added to the nearest proctor, ‘Take her to the Infirmary, but keep her under guard. I expect the police will want to talk to her in the morning.’

  ‘Yes, sir, we will,’ said Bill, from the top of one of the rowans. He was untangling himself from his flying cloak. Its trailing edge had been caught by the curse and the whole garment was being eaten away by a rapidly spreading and highly unpleasant mold.

  ‘Bill!’ exclaimed Francesca, letting go of Mari’s hand to run to him. He fell from the tree as she reached the trunk, and they embraced tightly before Bill remembered he was on duty and gently pushed her away.

  Mari smiled at them and gingerly pulled herself upright, using the moondial’s pillar as a support. Everyone seemed to have forgotten her. The Chancellor was talking to Professor Aiken; the proctors were picking up Diadem and clustering around in a ‘guarding the scene of the crime long after it was necessary’ kind of way; Bill was taking out his notebook to write something while Francesca clung to his arm; several other policemen were dragging in Lannisa and Clairmore, both of them handcuffed; and large numbers of scared-looking undergraduates in a bewildering assortment of sleeping garments were filtering in from the New House and the Mo’Wood quadrangle.

  Because we swapped duty with Jena and Rellise, I’ll be doing breakfast in five hours, thought Mari. She sighed and was about to go and pick up her keys, hopefully before anyone in authority wondered exactly whose they were, when she felt someone lightly touch her wrist, just next to her bracelet.

  She turned and saw Alicia Wasp, the young woman of the sizar portrait, not the older Mistress of the College from the portrait in the Great Hall.

  ‘It is quite true that had I been born higher, I would not have striven to rise so high,’ said Alicia Wasp. ‘However, I forgot to say that you have to make being a sizar an advantage. Never just accept your lot, Mari. And thank you, for my College.’

  Mari nodded, and then blinked, because Alicia Wasp wasn’t there anymore and, as no one else had noticed her, possibly hadn’t been there in the first place.

  ‘Never accept your lot,’ whispered Mari to herself as she briskly walked over and picked up her keys. Then she positioned herself in front of the Chancellor and Professor Aiken and waited for a break in their conversation, which came quite soon as they both turned politely toward her.

  ‘I beg your pardon, Mistress Aiken,’ said the Sizar Mari Garridge. ‘But I wondered if, on account of all that’s been done tonight, Francesca and I might have a holiday tomorrow … that is, today? I believe that Jena and Rellise will most happily fulfill our duties.’

  The Big Question

  ALONG TIME AGO, AS PEOPLE measure time, but not so long that the stars have changed in the heavens or the rocks have turned to dust, a young man left his home to go hunting on the mountain that loomed above his village. He took two spears and a knife with him. One spear was short, for throwing, and that was his hunting spear. The other was long, and that was his fighting spear, should he meet any enemies.

  He took the fighting spear even though no one from his village had ever met or seen any enemies. Indeed the young man had never seen any strangers at all, and had heard only dim legends of outsiders who long ago had somehow managed to climb up to his home, a secret and very high valley, which lay nestled between three mountains.

  Two of the mountains were very high indeed and permanently covered in snow and ice. The third mountain was smaller, and a forest grew from the valley floor almost to the icy pinnacle that stood in the shadow of its much higher companions. The forest was full of animals to hunt and be taken home to fill the pot.

  The young man, who was called Avel by his family, was lucky that day. He speared two rabbits and one of the small deer that made such tasty venison. But as he skinned the deer, his hands moving almost without conscious direction, performing the task he had done so often, Avel found himself looking out from the mountainside, to the permanent carpet of clouds that shrouded the world beyond and below, and he wondered what lay beyond those clouds. Were there other animals he might hunt, and were there other people? Did they hunt deer, and eat venison, and raise corn?

  That night, he asked his mother, who was the wisest person he knew, what the world was like outside their valley.

  ‘I do not know, Avel,’ she replied. She thought for a while longer, and then added, ‘When I was a girl, there was a wise woman … or perhaps a wise man with a womanish voice … who lived in a cave near the big waterfall. My mother told
me that this wise woman knew about the world beyond. I have not thought of her in years, or heard if she still lives. Perhaps if you go there, you will learn the answer to your question.’

  Avel nodded. The big waterfall was four days’ walk away, at the foot of the valley. He had only been there once before, with his father, when he still lived and Avel was a child. It was a long way to go to get the answer to an idle thought.

  ‘It is not an important question,’ he said, and hugged her, before getting up to make sure his two younger brothers and three younger sisters did not eat all the cornbread, and that they had properly cleaned his spears, without injuring one another in the process.

  But Avel could not forget his question. Every time he went hunting and looked out from the upper slopes to the cloud-shrouded lands below, he wondered what was out there. Finally, he decided that he would go and talk to the wise woman who lived by the big waterfall and ask her his question.

  He left just after dawn the next day, bidding farewell to his mother, his brothers, and his sisters, as they prepared for the day’s work: weeding in the cornfield, fishing in the river, and, for his next-oldest brother, taking over Avel’s hunting grounds for a while.

  Other villagers waved or called out to him as he strode down the terraced hill below his house. Avel was well liked, for he was an amiable man, and a good hunter who readily shared his kills when he had more meat than he needed for his family’s needs.

  He met other villagers farther down the hill, who waved as they waded around their fish traps in the river that was meandering on its way to his own destination, the big waterfall.

  Avel reached the waterfall three days later, after an easy journey, walking downhill all the way, with occasional stops to hunt or gather food. He had dined well on rabbits, berries, and various roots, and had even enjoyed his solitary nights, without the press of the family and all their noise around him.