“Good morning,” he said. “This will be ready in five minutes, milady.”
Sabriel groaned at that word again. Feeling like a shambling, blanket-shrouded excuse for a human being, she picked up her shirt and trousers and staggered off to find a suitable bush en route to the spring.
The icy water of the spring completed the waking up process without kindness, Sabriel exposing herself to it and the marginally warmer air for no more than the ten seconds it took to shed undershirt, wash and get dressed again. Clean, awake and clothed, she returned to the campfire and ate her share of the porridge. Then Touchstone ate, while Sabriel buckled on armor, sword and bells. Mogget lay near the fire, warming his white-furred belly. Not for the first time, Sabriel wondered if he needed to eat at all. He obviously liked food, but he seemed to eat for amusement, rather than sustenance.
Touchstone continued being a servant after breakfast, cleaning pot and spoon, quenching the fire and putting everything away. But when he was about to swing the pack on his back, Sabriel stopped him.
“No, Touchstone. It’s my pack. I’ll carry it, thank you.”
He hesitated, then passed it to her and would have helped her put it on, but she had her arms through the straps and the pack swung on before he could take the weight.
Half an hour later, perhaps a third of the way up the narrow, stone-carved stair, Sabriel regretted her decision to take the pack. She still wasn’t totally recovered from the Paperwing crash and the stair was very steep, and so narrow that she had difficulty negotiating the spiraling turns. The pack always seemed to jam against the outside or inside wall, no matter which way she turned.
“Perhaps we should take it in turns to carry the pack,” she said reluctantly, when they stopped at a sort of alcove to catch their breath. Touchstone, who had been leading, nodded and came back down a few steps to take the pack.
“I’ll lead, then,” Sabriel added, flexing her back and shoulders, shuddering slightly at the pack-induced layer of sweat on her back, greasy under armor, tunic, shirt and undershirt. She picked up her candle from the bench and stepped up.
“No,” said Touchstone, stepping in her way. “There are guards—and guardians—on this stair. I know the words and signs to pass them. You are the Abhorsen, so they might let you past, but I am not sure.”
“Your memory must be coming back,” Sabriel commented, slightly peeved at being thwarted. “Tell me, is this stair the one you mentioned when you said the Queen was ambushed?”
“No,” Touchstone replied flatly. He hesitated, then added, “That stair was in Belisaere.”
With that, he turned, and continued up the stairs. Sabriel followed, Mogget at her heels. Now that she wasn’t lumbered by her pack, she felt more alert. Watching Touchstone, she saw him pause occasionally and mutter some words under his breath. Each time, there was the faint, feather-light touch of Charter Magic. Subtle magic, much cleverer than in the tunnel below. Harder to detect and probably much more deadly, Sabriel thought. Now she knew it was there, she also picked up the faint sensation of Death. This stair had seen killings, a long, long, time ago.
Finally, they came to a large chamber, with a set of double doors to one side. Light leaked in from a large number of small, circular holes in the roof, or as Sabriel soon saw, through an overgrown lattice that had once been open to air and sky.
“That’s the outside door,” Touchstone said, unnecessarily. He snuffed out his candle, took Sabriel’s, now little more than a stub of wax, and put both in a pocket stitched to the front of his kilt. Sabriel thought of joking about the hot wax and the potential for damage, but thought better of it. Touchstone was not the lighthearted type.
“How does it open?” asked Sabriel, indicating the door. She couldn’t see any handle, lock or key. Or any hinges, for that matter.
Touchstone was silent, eyes unfocused and staring, then he laughed, a bitter little chuckle.
“I don’t remember! All the way up the stair, all the words and signals . . . and now useless! Useless!”
“At least you got us up the steps,” Sabriel pointed out, alarmed by the violence of his self-loathing. “I’d still be sitting by the spring, watching it bubble, if you hadn’t come along.”
“You would have found the way out,” Touchstone muttered. “Or Mogget would. Wood! Yes, that’s what I deserve to be—”
“Touchstone,” Mogget interrupted, hissing. “Shut up. You’re to be useful, remember?”
“Yes,” replied Touchstone, visibly calming his breathing, composing his face. “I’m sorry, Mogget. Milady.”
“Please, please, just Sabriel,” she said tiredly. “I’ve only just left school—I’m only eighteen! Calling me milady seems ridiculous.”
“Sabriel,” Touchstone said tentatively. “I will try to remember. ‘Milady’ is a habit . . . it reminds me of my place in the world. It’s easier for me—”
“I don’t care what’s easier for you!” Sabriel snapped. “Don’t call me milady and stop acting like a halfwit! Just be yourself. Behave normally. I don’t need a valet, I need a useful . . . friend!”
“Very well, Sabriel,” Touchstone said, with careful emphasis. He was angry now, but at least that was an improvement over servile, Sabriel thought.
“Now,” she said to the smirking Mogget. “Have you got any ideas about this door?”
“Just one,” replied Mogget, sliding between her legs and over to the thin line that marked the division between the two leaves of the door. “Push. One on each side.”
“Push?”
“Why not?” said Touchstone, shrugging. He took up a position, braced against the left side of the door, palms flat on the metal-studded wood. Sabriel hesitated, then did the same against the right.
“One, two, three, push!” announced Mogget.
Sabriel pushed on “three” and Touchstone on “push,” so their combined effort took several seconds to synchronize. Then the doors creaked slowly open, sunshine spilling through in a bright bar, climbing from floor to ceiling, dust motes dancing in its progress.
“It feels strange,” said Touchstone, the wood humming beneath his hands like plucked lute strings.
“I can hear voices,” exclaimed Sabriel at the same time, her ears full of half-caught words, laughter, distant singing.
“I can see time,” whispered Mogget, so softly that his words were lost.
Then the doors were open. They walked through, shielding their eyes against the sun, feeling the cool breeze sharp on their skin, the fresh scent of pine trees clearing their nostrils of underground dust. Mogget sneezed quickly three times, and ran about in a tight circle. The doors slid shut behind them, as silently and inexplicably as they’d opened.
They stood in a small clearing in the middle of a pine forest, or plantation, for the trees were regularly spaced. The doors behind them stood in the side of a low hillock of turf and stunted bushes. Pine needles lay thick on the ground, pinecones peeking through every few paces, like skulls ploughed up on some ancient battleground.
“The Watchwood,” said Touchstone. He took several deep breaths, looked at the sky, and sighed. “It is Winter, I think—or early Spring?”
“Winter,” replied Sabriel. “It was snowing quite heavily, back near the Wall. It seems much milder here.”
“Most of the Wall, the Long Cliffs, and Abhorsen’s House, are on, or part of, the Southern Plateau,” Mogget explained. “The plateau is between one and two thousand feet above the coastal plain. In fact, the area around Nestowe, where we are headed, is mostly below sea level and has been reclaimed.”
“Yes,” said Touchstone. “I remember. Long Dyke, the raised canals, the wind pumps to raise the water—”
“You’re both very informative for a change,” remarked Sabriel. “Would one of you care to tell me something I really want to know, like what are the Great Charters?”
“I can’t,” Mogget and Touchstone said together. Then Touchstone continued, haltingly, “There is a spell . . . a binding on u
s. But someone who is not a Charter Mage, or otherwise closely bound to the Charter, might be able to speak. A child, perhaps, baptized with the Charter mark, but not grown into power.”
“You’re cleverer than I thought,” commented Mogget. “Not that that’s saying much.”
“A child,” said Sabriel. “Why would a child know?”
“If you’d had a proper education, you’d know too,” said Mogget. “A waste of good silver, that school of yours.”
“Perhaps,” agreed Sabriel. “But now that I know more of the Old Kingdom, I suspect being at school in Ancelstierre saved my life. But enough of that. Which way do we go now?”
Touchstone looked at the sky, blue above the clearing, dark where the pines circled. The sun was just visible above the trees, perhaps an hour short of its noon-time zenith. Touchstone looked from it to the shadows of the trees, then pointed: “East. There should be a series of Charter Stones, leading from here to the eastern edge of the Watchwood. This place is heavily warded with magic. There are . . . there were, many stones.”
The stones were still there, and after the first, some sort of animal track that meandered from one stone to the next. It was cool under the pines, but pleasant, the constant presence of the Charter Stones a reassuring sensation to Sabriel and Touchstone, who could sense them like lighthouses in a sea of trees.
There were seven stones in all, and none of them broken, though Sabriel felt a stab of nervous tension every time they left the ambience of one and moved to another, a stark picture always flashing into her head—the bloodstained, riven stone of Cloven Crest.
The last stone stood on the very edge of the pine forest, atop a granite bluff thirty or forty yards high, marking the forest’s eastern edge and the end of high ground.
They stood next to the stone and looked out, out towards the huge expanse of blue-grey sea, white-crested, restless, always rolling in to shore. Below them were the flat, sunken fields of Nestowe, maintained by a network of raised canals, pumps and dykes. The village itself lay three-quarters of a mile away, high on another granite bluff, the harbor out of sight on the other side.
“The fields are flooded,” said Touchstone, in a puzzled tone, as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.
Sabriel followed his gaze, and saw that what she had taken for some crop was actually silt and water, sitting tepidly where food once grew. Windmills, power for the pumps, stood silent, trefoil-shaped vanes still atop scaffolding towers, even though a salt-laden breeze blew in from the sea.
“But the pumps were Charter-spelled,” Touchstone exclaimed. “To follow the wind, to work without care . . .”
“There are no people in the fields—no one on this side of the village,” Mogget added, his eyes keener than the telescope in Sabriel’s pack.
“Nestowe’s Charter Stone must be broken,” Sabriel said, mouth tight, words cold. “And I can smell a certain stench on the breeze. There are Dead in the village.”
“A boat would be the quickest way to Belisaere, and I am reasonably confident of my sailing,” Touchstone remarked. “But if the Dead are there, shouldn’t we . . .”
“We’ll go down and get a boat,” Sabriel announced firmly. “While the sun is high.”
chapter xvi
There was a built-up path through the flooded fields, but it was submerged to ankle-depth, with occasional thigh-high slippages. Only the raised canal drains stood well above the brackish water, and they all ran towards the east, not towards the village, so Sabriel and Touchstone were forced to wade along the path. Mogget, of course, rode, his lean form draped around Sabriel’s neck like a white fox fur.
Water and mud, coupled with an uncertain path, made it slow going. It took an hour to cover less than a mile, so it was later in the afternoon than Sabriel would have wished when they finally climbed out of the water, up onto the beginnings of the village’s rocky mount. At least the sky is clear, Sabriel thought, glancing up. The winter sun wasn’t particularly hot and couldn’t be described as glaring, but it would certainly deter most kindred of the Lesser Dead from venturing out.
Nevertheless, they walked carefully up to the village, swords loose, Sabriel with a hand to her bells. The path wound up in a series of steps carved from the rock, reinforced here and there with bricks and mortar. The village proper nestled on top of the bluff—about thirty cozy brick cottages, with wood-tile roofs, some painted bright colors, some dull, and some simply grey and weatherbeaten.
It was completely silent, save for the odd gust of wind, or the mournful cry of a gull, slipping down through the air above. Sabriel and Touchstone drew closer together, walking almost shoulder-to-shoulder up what passed for a main street, swords out now, eyes flickering across closed doors and shuttered windows. Both felt uneasy, nervous—a nasty, tingling, creeping sensation climbing up from spine, to nape of neck, to forehead Charter mark. Sabriel also felt the presence of Dead things. Lesser Dead, hiding from sunlight, lurking somewhere nearby, in house or cellar.
At the end of the main street, on the highest point of the bluff, a Charter Stone stood on a patch of carefully tended lawn. Half of the stone had been sheared away, pieces broken and tumbled, dark stone on green turf. A body lay in front of the stone, hands and feet bound, the gaping cut across the throat a clear sign of where the blood had come from—the blood for the sacrifice that broke the stone.
Sabriel knelt by the corpse, eyes averted from the broken stone. It was only recently ruined, she felt, but already the door to Death was creaking open. She could almost feel the cold of the currents beyond, leaking out around the stone, sucking warmth and life from the air. Things lurked there too, she knew, just beyond the border. She sensed their hunger for life, their impatience for night to fall.
As she expected, the corpse was of a Charter Mage, dead but three or four days. But she hadn’t expected to find the dead person was a woman. Wide shoulders and a muscular build had deceived her for a moment, but there was a middle-aged woman before her, eyes shut, throat cut, short brown hair caked with sea salt and blood.
“The village healer,” said Mogget, indicating a bracelet on her wrist with his nose. Sabriel pushed the rope bindings aside for a better look. The bracelet was bronze with inlaid Charter marks of greenstone. Dead marks now, for blood dried upon the bronze, and no pulse beat in the skin under the metal.
“She was killed three or four days ago,” Sabriel announced. “The stone was broken at the same time.”
Touchstone looked back at her and nodded grimly, then resumed watching the houses opposite. His swords hung loosely in his hands, but Sabriel noticed that his entire body was tense, like a compressed jack-in-the-box, ready to spring.
“Whoever . . . whatever . . . killed her and broke the stone, didn’t enslave her spirit,” Sabriel added quietly, as if thinking to herself. “I wonder why?”
Neither Mogget nor Touchstone answered. For a moment, Sabriel considered asking the woman herself, but her impetuous desire for journeys into Death had been soundly dampened by recent experience. Instead, she cut the woman’s bonds, and arranged her as best she could, ending up with a sort of curled-up sleeping position.
“I don’t know your name, Healer,” Sabriel whispered. “But I hope you go quickly beyond the Final Gate. Farewell.”
She stood back and drew the Charter marks for the funeral pyre above the corpse, whispering the names of the marks as she did so—but her fingers fumbled and words went awry. The baleful influence of the broken stone pressed against her, like a wrestler gripping her wrists, clamping her jaw. Sweat beaded on her forehead, and pain shot through her limbs, her hands shaking with effort, tongue clumsy, seeming swollen in her suddenly dry mouth.
Then she felt assistance come, strength flowing through her, reinforcing the marks, steadying her hands, clearing her voice. She completed the litany, and a spark exploded above the woman, became a twisting flame, then grew to a fierce, white-hot blaze that spread the length of the woman’s body, totally consuming it, to leave on
ly ash, light cargo for the sea winds.
The extra strength came through Touchstone’s hand, his open palm lightly resting on her shoulder. As she straightened up, the touch was lost. When Sabriel turned around, Touchstone was just drawing his right-hand sword, eyes fixed on the houses—as if he’d had nothing to do with helping her.
“Thank you,” said Sabriel. Touchstone was a strong Charter Mage, perhaps as strong as she was. This surprised her, though she couldn’t think why. He’d made no secret of being a Charter Mage—she’d just assumed he would only know a few of the more fighting-related marks and spells. Petty magics.
“We should move on,” said Mogget, prowling backwards and forwards in agitation, carefully avoiding the fragments from the broken stone. “Find a boat, and put to sea before nightfall.”
“The harbor is that way,” Touchstone added quickly, pointing with his sword. Both he and the cat seemed very keen to leave the area around the broken stone, thought Sabriel. But then, so was she. Even in bright daylight, it seemed to dull the color around it. The lawn was already more yellow than green, and even the shadows looked thicker and more abundant than they should. She shivered, remembering Cloven Crest and the thing called Thralk.
The harbor lay on the northern side of the bluff, reached by another series of steps in the rocky hill, or in the case of cargo, via one of the shear-legged hoists that lined the edge of the bluff. Long wooden jetties thrust out into the clear blue-green water, sheltered under the lee of a rocky island, a smaller sibling of the village bluff. A long breakwater of huge boulders joined island and shore, completing the harbor’s protection from wind and wave.