The sending held the sword extended for a few seconds without a waver. Then, so quickly she didn’t see it move, the point flicked against Lirael’s throat—just enough to break the skin, capturing a single bead of blood on the very tip of the blade.
Lirael gulped down a startled cry but remained frozen, fearful that it would strike again if she flinched. She knew much of the lore of sendings, having continued her studies even after “creating” the Dog. But she could not gauge the true purpose of this one. For the first time since she had gone to confront the Stilken, she felt afraid, and the chill dread of Charter Magic gone wrong welled up inside her bones.
The sending lifted its sword again, and Lirael did flinch this time, unable to control the twitch of fright. But the guard was simply making that drop of blood run down the gutter of the blade in a slow, stately roll, like a bead of oil, not leaving a trace on the Charter-woven steel. After what seemed an age, the bead reached the hilt and sank into the crossguard like butter into toast.
Behind Lirael, the Dog let out a long, half-woofed sigh, even as the sending saluted with the sword—and broke apart, the Charter symbols that had made it momentarily real spinning out into the air before fading away into nothingness. In a few seconds, no sign of the sending remained.
Lirael realized she’d been holding her breath, and let it out with a relieved whoosh. She touched her neck, expecting to feel the unpleasant wetness of blood. But there was nothing, no cut, not even a slight unevenness in the skin.
The Dog’s snout nudged her behind the knee. Then the hound slipped past and grinned back at her.
“Well, you passed that test,” she said. “You can open the door now.”
“I’m not sure I want to,” replied Lirael thoughtfully, still fingering her neck. “Maybe we should go back.”
“What!” exclaimed the Dog, her ears sticking up in disbelief. “Not look? Since when have you become Miss We Shouldn’t Be Here?”
“It could have cut my throat,” said Lirael, her voice trembling. “It nearly did.”
The Disreputable Dog rolled her eyes and collapsed onto her front paws in exasperation. “It was only testing you, to make sure you have the Blood. You’re a Daughter of the Clayr—no Charter-made creature would harm you. Though as the greater world is full of danger, you’d better start getting used to the idea that you can’t give up at the first thing that scares you!”
“Am I a Daughter of the Clayr?” whispered Lirael, tears starting in her eyes. She had held her sorrow in all year, but it was always worst on her birthday. Now it could not be repressed. She crouched down and hugged the Dog, ignoring the damp reek of dog-smell. “I’m nineteen and I still haven’t got the Sight. I don’t look like everyone else. When that sending put out its sword, I suddenly realized that it knew. It knew I’m not a Clayr, and it was going to kill me.”
“But it didn’t, because you are a Clayr, idiot,” said the Dog, quite gently. “You’ve seen the hunting dogs, how every now and then one will be born with floppy ears or have a brown back instead of gold. They’re still part of the pack. You’re just a floppy-ear.”
“But I can’t See the future!” cried Lirael. “Would the pack accept a dog that couldn’t smell?”
“You can smell,” said the Dog, rather illogically. She licked Lirael’s cheek. “Besides, you have other gifts. None of the others are half the Charter Mage you are, are they?”
“No,” whispered Lirael. “But Charter Magic doesn’t count. It’s the Sight that makes the Clayr. Without it, I am nothing.”
“Well, perhaps there are other things you can learn,” encouraged the Dog. “You might find something else—”
“What? Like an interest in embroidery?” Lirael said in a depressed monotone, cradling her head in her tear-dampened forearms. “Or perhaps you think I should take up leatherwork?”
“That,” said the Dog, her voice losing all sympathy, “is self-pity, and there’s only one way to deal with it.”
“What?” asked Lirael sullenly.
“This,” said the Dog, lunging forward and nipping her quite sharply on the leg.
“Ow!” Lirael shrieked, leaping up and stumbling against the door. “What did you do that for?”
“You were being pathetic,” said the Dog, as Lirael rubbed the spot on her calf where visible tooth-marks indented her soft wool leggings. “Now you’re just cross, which is an improvement.”
Lirael eyed the Dog balefully but didn’t answer, because she couldn’t think of anything to say that wouldn’t—quite accurately—be seen as sulky or bad-tempered. Besides, she remembered a particular dog bite from her seventeenth birthday and had no desire to add a nineteenth-birthday scar.
The Dog stared back, her head tilted to one side, ears cocked, waiting for some sort of reply. Lirael knew from experience that the Dog could sit like that for hours if necessary, and gave up the struggle to maintain her self-pity. Clearly, the Dog just didn’t understand how important it was to have the Sight.
“So—how do I open this?” asked Lirael.
Without realizing it, she’d been leaning against the door, catching her balance there after the nip-assisted leap. She could feel the Charter Magic in it, warm and rhythmic under the palm of her hand, moving in slow counterpoint to the pulse in her wrist and neck.
“Give it a push,” suggested the Dog, moving closer, sniffing at the crack where the door met the floor. “The sending probably unlocked it for you.”
Lirael shrugged and placed both palms against the door. Curiously, the metal studs seemed to have moved while she wasn’t looking. They had been all mixed up but were now sorted into three distinct patterns, though there was no obvious meaning to them. Lirael wasn’t sure which particular symbols were under her palms, though she could feel them leaving an imprint on her skin.
Even the metal studs were impregnated with Charter symbols, Lirael felt. She didn’t know precisely what they were, but it was clear the door was a major work of magic, the result of many months of superior spell-casting and equally masterful metalwork and carpentry.
She pushed once, and the door groaned. She pushed more forcefully, and it suddenly slid back like a concertina, separating into seven distinct panels. Lirael didn’t notice that as this happened, one of the three symbols completely disappeared, leaving only two types of studs visible. She was overcome by a sudden surge of Charter Magic that flowed out of the door and somehow into Lirael herself. She felt it coursing through her, infusing her with a heady happiness she had not felt since the Disreputable Dog had first come to banish her loneliness. It swam in her blood, sparked in her breath—then it was gone, and she staggered against the door-frame. At the same time, the impression of the studs on her hands faded before she could see what they meant.
“Whew!” she said, shaking her head, one hand unconsciously feeling for the comforting bulk of the Dog at her side. “What was that?”
“The Door just said hello,” replied the Dog. Slipping from Lirael’s grasp, she was already questing ahead, paws clicking as she essayed the first steps of a flight that spun downwards into the mountain.
“What do you mean?” asked Lirael. The Dog’s upthrust, wagging tail whisked down and around the curve of the spiral. “How can a door say hello? Wait! Wait for me!”
The Disreputable Dog wasn’t known for listening to commands, requests, or even entreaties, but she was waiting about twenty steps lower down. There were fewer Charter marks providing light here, and the steps were covered in dark moss. Clearly no one had passed this way for a very long time.
She looked up as Lirael reached her, then immediately took off down the steps again, easily re-establishing her twenty-step lead, and was once again lost to sight, though Lirael could hear her paws steadily clicking down the steps.
Lirael sighed and followed more slowly, not trusting the moss-covered stair. There was something farther down that she didn’t quite like, and she felt oppressed by some sense of unease, below the level of consciousness. A sort
of vaguely unpleas-ant pressure that was increasing with every downwards step.
The Dog waited, at least momentarily, eight more times before they reached the bottom of the deep stairs. Lirael guessed they were now more than four hundred yards deeper under the mountain than she had ever been before. There were no ice intrusions here, either, adding to her feeling of strangeness. It wasn’t like any other part of the Clayr’s domain.
It kept getting darker, too, the lower they went, the old Charter marks for light fading till there were only a few flickering here and there. Whoever had built this stair had started from the bottom, Lirael realized, looking at the marks. The lower ones were much older and had not been replaced for centuries.
Normally, she didn’t mind the darkness, but it was different here, deep in the mountain. Lirael called up a light herself, two bright Charter marks of illumination that she wove into her hair, to send a bobbing fall of light ahead of her as she descended.
At the bottom of the stairs, the Dog was scratching the back of her ear in front of another Charter-bound door. This one was of stone, and there were some letters carved into it, large, deep-cut letters using the Middle Alphabet, as well as the Charter symbols only a Charter Mage could see.
Lirael bent closer to read them, then recoiled, turned to the steps, and tried to run away. Somehow the Dog got between her legs, tripping her. Lirael fell and lost control of her light spell, and the bright marks went out, twisting back into the endless flow of the Charter.
For a moment of pure panic, she scrabbled in the darkness, heading for what she thought were the steps. Then her fingers met the soft, wet nose of the Dog, and she saw a faint, spectral glow outlining the shape of her canine companion.
“That was smart,” said the Dog in the darkness, moving closer to woofle wetly in Lirael’s ear. “I take it you didn’t suddenly remember a pie in the oven?”
“The door,” whispered Lirael, making no effort to get up. “It’s a grave door. To a crypt.”
“Is it?”
“It’s got my name on it,” muttered Lirael.
There was a long pause. Then the Dog said, “So you think someone went to all the trouble to make you a crypt a thousand years ago on the off chance you might turn up one day, walk in, and have a convenient heart attack?”
“No . . .”
There was another long pause, and then the Dog said, “Presuming that this actually is the door to a crypt, may I ask how rare the name Lirael is?”
“Well, I think there was a great-aunt I’m named after, and there was another one before her—”
“So if it is a crypt, it’s probably that of some long-ago Lirael,” the Dog suggested kindly. “But what makes you think it is a crypt door, anyway? I seem to recall there were two words on the door. And the second one didn’t look like ‘grave’ or ‘crypt.’ ”
“What did it say, then?” asked Lirael, wearily standing up, already mentally reaching for the Charter marks that would give her light, hands ready to sketch them in the air. She couldn’t even remember reading the second word, but didn’t want to admit to the Dog that she’d just had the overwhelming feeling that it was a crypt. That feeling, combined with seeing her own name, had created a moment of total panic, when her only thought was to get out, to get back to the safety of the Library.
“Something quite different,” said the Dog with satisfaction, as light bloomed from Lirael’s fingertips, falling cleanly on the door.
This time, Lirael looked long at the carved letters, her hands touching the deep-etched stone. Her forehead wrinkled as she read the words again and again, as if she couldn’t quite put the letters together into a sensible word.
“I don’t understand,” she said finally. “The second word is ‘path.’ It says ‘Lirael’s Path’!”
“Guess you should go through, then,” said the Dog, unperturbed by the sign. “Even if you’re not the Lirael whose path it is, you are a Lirael, which in my book is a pretty good excuse—”
“Dog. Shut up,” said Lirael, thinking. If this gate was the beginning of a path named for her, it had been made at least a thousand years ago. Which was not impossible, for the Clayr sometimes had visions of such far-distant futures. Or possible futures, as they called them, for the future was apparently like a many-branching stream, splitting, converging, and splitting again. Much of the Clayr’s training, at least as far as Lirael knew, was in working out which possible future was the most likely—or the most desirable.
But there was a catch to the notion that the long-ago Clayr had Seen Lirael, because the Clayr of the present time couldn’t See Lirael’s future at all and had never been able to do so. Sanar and Ryelle had told her that even when the Nine Day Watch tried to See her, there was nothing. Lirael’s future was impenetrable, as was her present. No Clayr had ever Seen her, not even in a chance-found minute showing her in the Library, or asleep in bed a month hence. Once again she was different, not able to See and also Unseen.
If even the Nine Day Watch couldn’t See her, Lirael thought, how could the Clayr of a thousand years past know she would come this way? And why would they build not only this door but also the stairs? It was far more likely that this path was named for one of her ancestors, some other Lirael of long ago.
That made her feel better about opening the door. She leaned forward, pushing with both hands against the cold stone. Charter Magic flowed in this door, too, but it did not leap into her, instead just pulsing gently against her skin. It was like an old dog by the fire, content to be stroked, knowing it need not obviously show delight.
The door moved slowly inwards, resisting her push, with a long-drawn-out screech of stone on stone. Colder air flowed from the other side, ruffling Lirael’s hair, making the Charter lights dance. There was a damp smell, too, and the strange, oppressive feeling Lirael had encountered on the stairs grew stronger, like the beginning buzz of a toothache that heralds future pain.
A vast chamber lay beyond the door, space stretching up and out, seemingly endless, beyond the pool of light around her. A cavern, measureless in the dark, perhaps going on forever.
Lirael stepped in and looked up, up into darkness, till her neck ached, and her eyes slowly grew accustomed to the gloom. Strange luminescence, not from Charter Magic lights, shone in patches here and there, rising up so high that the farthest glow was like a distant swathe of stars in the night. Still looking up, Lirael realized that she stood at the bottom of a deep rift that stretched up almost to the very pinnacle of Starmount itself. She looked across and saw that she stood on a broad ledge, and the rift continued past it, down into still deeper darkness, perhaps even to the root of the world itself. With that sight came recognition, for she knew only one chasm so narrow and so deep. Much higher up, it was spanned by closed bridges. Lirael had crossed it almost unknowingly many times, but had never seen its terrifying depth.
“I know this place,” said Lirael, her voice small and echoing. “We’re in the bottom of the Rift, aren’t we?”
She hesitated, then added, “The burial place of the Clayr.”
The Disreputable Dog nodded but didn’t say anything.
“You knew, didn’t you?” continued Lirael, still looking up. She couldn’t see them, but she knew the higher reaches of the Rift were pockmarked with small caves, each one holding the mortal remains of a past Clayr. Generations of dead, carefully tucked away in this vertical cemetery. In a weird way, she could feel the presence of the graves, or the dead inside them . . . or something.
Her mother was not there, for she had died alone in some foreign land, far from the Clayr, too far for the body to be returned. But Filris rested here, as did others whom Lirael had known.
“It is a crypt,” she said, looking sternly at the Dog. “I knew it.”
“Actually it’s more of an ossuary,” the Dog began. “I understand that when a Clayr Sees her death, she is lowered down by rope to a suitable ledge, where she digs her own—”
“They do not!” interrupted Lirael,
shocked. “They only know when, to some degree. And Pallimor and the gardeners usually prepare the caves. Aunt Kirrith says it’s very ill-bred to want to dig your own cave—”
She stopped suddenly and whispered, “Dog? Am I here because they’ve Seen me die and I have to dig my own cave because I’m ill-bred?”
“I’m going to have to bite you properly if you keep up that nonsense,” growled the Dog. “Why this sudden preoccupation with dying, anyway?”
“Because I can feel it, feel it all around me,” muttered Lirael. “Particularly here.”
“That’s because the doorways to Death are ajar where many people have died, or where many lie buried,” said the Dog absently. “The Blood mixes a little, so there are always Clayr who are sensitive to Death. That’s what you feel. You shouldn’t be afraid of it.”
“I’m not, really,” replied Lirael, puzzled. “It’s like an ache or an itch. It makes me want to do something. Scratch it. Make it go away.”
“You don’t know any necromancy, do you?”
“Of course not! That’s Free Magic. It’s forbidden.”
“Not necessarily. Clayr have dabbled in Free Magic before, and some still do,” said the Dog in a distracted manner. She’d caught the scent of something and was snuffling vigorously around Lirael’s feet.
“Who dabbles in Free Magic?” asked Lirael. The Dog didn’t answer but continued to sniff around Lirael’s feet. “What can you smell?”
“Magic,” said the Dog, looking up for a second before resuming her snuffle, roaming out in an ever-increasing circle. “Old, old magic. Hidden here, in the depths of the world. How very, very . . . yow!”
Her last words ended in a yelp as a sudden sheet of flame sprang up across the rift, heat and light exploding everywhere. Lirael, totally unprepared, staggered back, falling across the open doorway. An instant later, the Dog collided with her, smelling distinctly singed.