Halfway back along the Rift towards the door where she’d come in, Lirael was surprised to see that a long bridge of ice had spanned the depths. The Clayr were walking back across it and then into a deep cave-mouth on the other side of the Rift. Ryelle saw her look and explained, “There are many ways to and from the Observatory, when we have need. This bridge will melt when we have all crossed.”
Lirael nodded dumbly. She’d always wondered where the Observatory actually was, and had tried to find it on more than one occasion. She’d had many daydreams of finding her way there, and finding her Sight within. But all those daydreams were destroyed now.
Across the bridge, the cave-mouth led into a rudely dug tunnel that sloped up quite steeply. It was hard going, and Lirael was hot and out of breath when the tunnel finally flattened out. Ryelle and Sanar stopped then, and Lirael wiped the sweat from her eyes before she looked around. They had left stone behind. Now there was nothing but ice all around, blue ice that reflected the Charter lights the Clayr carried. They had come to the heart of the Glacier.
A gate was carved in the ice, flanked by two guards in full mail, holding shields that bore the golden star of the Clayr. Their faces were stern under their open helms. One carried an axe that gleamed with Charter marks, the other a sword that shone brighter than the lights, casting a thousand tiny reflections in the ice. Lirael stared at the guards, for they were clearly Clayr, but no one she knew, which she had thought impossible. There were less than three thousand Clayr in the Glacier, and she had lived here all her life.
“I See you, Voice of the Nine Day Watch,” said the woman with the axe, speaking in a strange, formal tone. “You may pass. But the other with you has not Awoken. By the ancient laws, she must not be allowed to See the secret ways.”
“Don’t be silly, Erimael,” said Sanar. “What ancient laws? It’s Lirael, Arielle’s daughter.”
“Erimael?” whispered Lirael, peering at the severe face, sharply defined by the edges of her helm. Erimael had joined the Rangers six years ago and hadn’t been seen since. Lirael had thought Erimael must have been killed in an accident and that she’d missed her Farewell, as she had missed so many other events that required her to don the blue tunic.
“The laws are clear,” said Erimael, still in the same stern voice, though Lirael saw her gulp nervously. “I am the Axe-Guard. She must be blindfolded if you wish her to pass.”
Sanar snorted and turned to the other woman. “And what says the Sword-Guard? Don’t tell me you agree?”
“Yes, unfortunately,” said the other woman, who Lirael realized was much older. “The letter of the law is strict. Guests must be blindfolded. Anyone who is not an Awoken Clayr is a guest.”
Sanar sighed and turned to Lirael. But Lirael had already hung her head, to hide her humiliation. Slowly, she undid her head scarf, folded it into a narrow band, and bound it around her head, covering her eyes. Behind the soft darkness of the cloth, she wept silently, the blindfold soaking up her tears.
Sanar and Ryelle took her hands again, and Lirael felt the sympathy in their touch. But it did not matter. This was even worse than when she was fourteen, standing alone in her blue tunic, suffering the public shame of not being a Clayr. Now she was irrevocably marked as an outsider. Not a Clayr at all, of any kind. Only a guest.
She asked only two questions as Ryelle and Sanar led her through what felt like a complicated, maze-like passage.
“When will I have to go?”
“Today,” replied Ryelle, as she stopped Lirael and prepared her for another sharp turn by gently pushing her elbow till she was facing the right way. “That is to say, as soon as possible. A boat is being prepared for you. It will be spelled to take you down the Ratterlin to Qyrre. From there you should be able to get some constables or even some of the Guard to escort you to Edge, on the Red Lake itself. It should be a fast and uneventful journey, though we wish we could See some of it beforehand.”
“Am I to go alone?”
Lirael couldn’t see, but she sensed Sanar and Ryelle exchanging glances, silently working out who would speak. At last Sanar said, “That is how you have been Seen, so I’m afraid that is how you will have to go. I wish it were otherwise. We would fly you down by Paperwing, but all the Paperwings have been Seen elsewhere, so the river it must be.”
Alone. Without even her one friend, the Disreputable Dog. It didn’t really matter what happened to her now.
“There are some steps down here,” said Ryelle, stopping Lirael again. “About thirty, I think. Then we will be in the Observatory, and you can take the blindfold off.”
Lirael mechanically went with the twins down the steps. It was unsettling, not being able to see where her feet were going, and some of the steps seemed lower than the others. To make it worse, there was a weird rustling noise all around, and occasionally the hint of whispers or smothered conversations.
Finally, they arrived on level ground and took a half dozen steps forward. Sanar helped untie her blindfold.
Light was the first thing Lirael noticed, and space, and then the massed ranks of the Clayr, silently standing in their white, rustling robes. She stood in the center of a huge chamber carved entirely out of ice, a vast cave easily as large as the Great Hall she knew and hated so much. Charter Magic lights shone everywhere, reflecting from the many facets of the ice, so that there was not a hint of darkness anywhere.
Lirael instinctively looked down when she saw all the other Clayr, so she couldn’t meet anyone’s eyes. But as she cautiously peered out from behind her protective fall of singed hair, she saw that they were not looking at her. They were all looking up. She followed their gaze and saw that the angled ceiling was perfectly smooth and flat, one single enormous sheet of clear ice, almost like an enormous, opaque window.
“Yes,” said Sanar, noting Lirael’s stare. “That is where we focus our Sight, so all the fragments of the vision can become one, and everyone can See.”
“I think we may begin,” announced Ryelle, looking around at the massed, silent ranks of the Clayr. Nearly every Awoken Clayr was there, to join a Watch of Fifteen Sixty-Eight. They stood in a series of ever-wider circles around the small central area where Lirael, Sanar, and Ryelle stood, like some strange concentric orchard of white trees that bore silver and moonstone fruit.
“Let us begin!” cried Sanar and Ryelle, and they lifted their wands and clashed them together like swords. Lirael jumped as all the gathered Clayr shouted back, a great bellow that she felt through her bones.
“Let us begin!”
As one, the Clayr in the closest circle joined hands, snapping together as in a military drill. Then the next circle joined hands, and the next, a wave of movement rippling from the center to the farthest circle in the Observatory, till all was still again.
“Let us See!” cried Sanar and Ryelle, clashing their wands again. This time, Lirael was prepared for the shout that came back, but not for the magic that followed. Charter marks seemed to well up out of the icy floor, flowing up through the Clayr of the first circle, till there were so many, they brimmed over and flowed into the next circle, and then the one after that. Charter marks that flowed like thick golden fog up the Clayr’s bodies and along their arms.
Lirael watched the magic grow as it passed each circle, saw it wrap itself around the bodies of her cousins. She could see the Charter marks, feel the magic in her pounding heart, hunger for it. But it remained alien, somehow beyond her, as no other Charter Magic had ever been.
Then the outermost circle of the Clayr broke their handclasps and held their arms up towards the distant, icy ceiling. Marks flowed from them into the air, falling upwards like golden dust caught in shafts of sunlight. When it hit the ice, it splashed there, as if it were glorious paint and the ice a blank canvas waiting to come alive.
Each circle followed in turn, till all the magic they’d summoned had risen to fill the whole huge ice ceiling with swirling Charter marks. They stared at it, entranced, and Lirael saw their eyes
move as if they all watched something there. But she saw nothing, nothing save the swirl of magic that she couldn’t understand.
“Look,” said Ryelle softly, and the wand she held suddenly became a bottle of bright green glass.
“Learn,” said Sanar, and she waved her wand in a pattern directly above Lirael’s head.
Then Ryelle threw the contents of the bottle, seemingly at Lirael. But as the liquid flew over her head, Sanar’s wand transformed it into ice. A pane of pure, translucent ice that hung horizontally in the air directly above Lirael’s head.
Sanar tapped this pane with her wand, and it began to glow a deep, comfortable blue. She tapped it again, and the blue fled to the edges. Lirael stared at it, and then through it, and as she stared, she realized that this strange, suspended pane was helping her See what the Clayr Saw. The meaningless patterns on the ice ceiling above were starting to become clear. Hundreds, maybe even thousands of tiny pictures were joining together to make up a larger picture, like the puzzle pictures she’d played with as a child.
It was a picture of a man standing with his foot on a rock, Lirael saw now. He was looking at something below him.
Curious, Lirael craned her head back for a better view. That made her dizzy for an instant, and then it seemed as if she were falling upwards, through the blue pane and all the way up into the ceiling, falling into the vision. There was a flash of blue and a touch of something that made her shiver—and she was there!
She was standing next to the man. She could hear his rasping, unhealthy-sounding breath, smell the faintest hint of sweat, feel the heat and humidity of a summer day.
And she could taste the awful taint of Free Magic, stronger and more vile than she could ever have imagined, stronger even than her memory of the Stilken. So strong that the bile rose in her throat and she had to force it back, and dots danced before her eyes.
Chapter Thirty
Nicholas and the Pit
He was young, Lirael saw, about her own age. Nineteen or twenty. And obviously ill. He was tall, but stooped over, as if a nagging pain bit his middle. His blond, unkempt hair was clean, but hung together like damp string. His skin was too pink in the cheeks and grey around his lips and eyes. Those eyes were blue, but dulled. He held a pair of dark spectacles loosely in one hand, the arms repaired with twine and one green lens cracked and starred.
He was standing on some sort of artificial hill of rough, loose earth, peering shortsightedly down towards a deep pit, a gaping hole in the ground. The pit—or whatever was in it—was the source of the Free Magic that was making Lirael nauseated, even through the vision. She could feel waves of it pulsating out of the scarred earth, cold and terrible, eating into her bones, biting away deep inside her teeth.
The pit had obviously been freshly dug. It was at least as wide across as the Lower Refectory, which could hold four hundred people. A spiral path wound around its edges, dis-appearing down into the dark depths. Lirael couldn’t see how deep it was, but there were people carrying baskets of dirt and rock up and empty baskets back down. Slow, tired people, who seemed quite strange to Lirael. Their clothes were dirty and torn, but even so, Lirael could see that their cut and color was quite unlike anything she’d ever seen. And nearly all of them wore blue hats or the knotted remnants of blue headscarves.
Lirael wondered how on earth they could work with the corrosive taint of Free Magic all around, and looked at them more closely. Then she gasped and tried to move back, but the vision held her.
They weren’t people. They were Dead. She could feel them now, feel the chill of Death close by. These workers were Dead Hands, enslaved by some necromancer’s will. The blue hats shaded sightless eye sockets, the blue scarves held together rotting heads.
Lirael suppressed her instinctive desire to vomit and quickly looked at the young man next to her, fearful that he might be the necromancer and could somehow see her. But he had no Charter mark on his brow, either whole or perverted to Free Magic. His forehead was clear, save for dirty beads of sweat that had caught the dust from the air, and there was no sign of any bells.
He was looking up now, looking at the sky, and shaking some metal object on his wrist. Perhaps in ritual, Lirael thought. She suddenly felt sorry for him, and had a strange urge to touch the curve of his neck where it joined his ear, just with the very tip of her fingers. She even started to reach out, and was only reminded of where—and what—she was when he spoke.
“Damn it!” he muttered. “Why does nothing work?”
He lowered his arm but kept looking up. Lirael looked too, seeing the dark thunderclouds that roiled there, low and close. Lightning flickered, but there was no cool breeze, no scent of rain. Just the heat and the lightning.
Then, without warning, a blinding bolt of lightning struck down into the pit, lighting the black depths in a bright flash of incandescence. In that moment, Lirael saw hundreds of Dead Hands digging, digging with tools if they had them and with their own rotting hands if not. They paid no attention to the lightning, which burnt and blackened several of their number, nor the deafening crash of thunder that came at almost the same time.
Within a few seconds, another bolt followed the first, seemingly hitting exactly the same place. Then another and another, thunder booming on and on, shaking the ground at Lirael’s feet.
“Four in approximately fifty seconds,” remarked the man to himself. “It’s getting more frequent. Hedge!”
Lirael didn’t understand this last call till a man strode out of the pit below and waved. A thin, balding man, clad in leather armor with gold-etched red enamel steel plates at his throat, elbows, and knees. He had a sword at his side—and a bandolier of bells across his chest, black ebony handles poking out of red leather pouches. Perversions of Charter marks moved across both wood and leather, leaving after-images of fire.
Even from so far away, he smelt of blood and hot metal. He must be the necromancer the Dead Hands served—or one of the necromancers, for there were many Dead. But this one was not the source of the Free Magic that burnt at Lirael’s lips and tongue. Something far worse than he lay hidden in the depths of the pit.
“Yes, Master Nicholas?” called the man. Lirael noted that he waved the two Dead Hands that followed him back down into the shadows, as if he didn’t want them too clearly seen.
“The lightning comes more quickly,” said the young man, so identifying himself to Lirael as Nicholas. But what manner of man—a man without a Charter mark—would a necromancer call Master?
“We must be close,” he added, his voice going hoarse. “Ask the men if they will work an extra shift tonight.”
“Oh, they’ll work!” shouted the necromancer, laughing at some private jest. “Do you want to come down?”
Nicholas shook his head. He had to clear his throat several times before he could shout back, “I feel . . . I feel unwell again, Hedge. I’m going to lie down in my tent. I will look later. But you must call me if you find anything. It will be metal, I think. Yes, shining metal,” he continued, eyes staring as if he saw it in front of him. “Two shining metal hemispheres, each taller than a man. We must find them quickly. Quickly!”
Hedge half bowed, but he didn’t answer. He climbed out of the pit, leaving it to walk up to the hill of tailings where Nicholas stood.
“Who is that with you?” shouted Hedge, pointing.
Nicholas looked to where he pointed but saw nothing save the afterglow of the lightning and the image of the shining hemispheres—the image he saw in all his waking moments, as if it were imprinted on his brain.
“Nothing,” he muttered, looking straight at Lirael. “No one. I am so tired. But it will be a great discovery—”
“Spy! You’ll burn at the feet of my Master!”
Flames leapt from the necromancer’s hands and spilled on the ground, red flames cloaked in black, choking smoke. They raced up the hill like wildfire, straight towards Lirael.
At the same time, she saw Nicholas’s eyes suddenly focus on her.
He reached out one hand in greeting, saying, “Hello! But I expect you’re only another hallucination.”
Then hands gripped her shoulders and she was pulled back into the Observatory as the red fire struck where she’d been and boiled up into a narrow column of fiery destruction and blackest smoke.
Ice shattered, and Lirael blinked. When she opened her eyes, she was standing between Ryelle and Sanar again, in a pool of broken shards, with pieces of blue ice sprinkled across her head and shoulders.
“You Saw,” said Ryelle. It wasn’t a question.
“Yes,” replied Lirael, sorely troubled, as much by the experience of the vision as by what she’d Seen. “Is that what it is like to have the Sight?”
“Not exactly,” replied Sanar. “We mostly See in short flashes, brief fragments from many different parts of the future, all mixed up. Only together, in the Watch, here in the Observatory, can we unify the vision. Even then, only the person who stands where you have stood will See it all.”
Lirael thought about that and craned her head back again, ice dribbling down her neck under her shirt. The distant ceiling was only a patch of ice again. She looked back down and saw that all the Clayr were leaving without a word or a backwards glance. The outer ring had gone before she even noticed, and now the next was uncurling into a single file, leaving by a different door. There seemed to be many exits from the Observatory, Lirael thought. Soon she would take one herself, never to return again.
“What,” Lirael began, forcing herself to think about the vision, “what am I supposed to do?”
“We don’t know,” said Ryelle. “We have been trying to See around the Red Lake for several years, without success. Then all of a sudden we Saw you in the room below, the vision we have shown you, and then a glimpse of you and the man in a boat upon the lake. All are obviously linked in some way, but we have not been able to See more.”