Sabriel (Abhorsen 1)

The other two books were normal enough by comparison. Both were Charter Magic spell books, listing mark after mark, and how they could be used. Sabriel didn’t even recognize most of the marks after chapter four in the first book. There were twenty chapters in each volume.

Doubtless there were many other books that would be useful, Sabriel thought, but she still felt too tired and shaky to get more down. She planned to talk to Mogget, then study for an hour or two, before going back to bed. Even four or five waking hours seemed too much after her ordeal, and the loss of consciousness involved in sleep suddenly seemed very appealing.

Mogget, as if he had heard Sabriel thinking of him, appeared at the top of the steps and sauntered over to sprawl on a well-upholstered footstand.

“I see you have found that book,” he said, tail flicking backwards and forwards as he spoke. “Take care you do not read too much.”

“I’ve already read it all, anyway,” replied Sabriel, shortly.

“Perhaps,” remarked the cat. “But it isn’t always the same book. Like me, it is several things, not one.”

Sabriel shrugged, as if to show that she knew all about the book. But that was just bravado—the inner Sabriel was afraid of The Book of the Dead. She had worked her way through every chapter, under her father’s direction, but her normally excellent memory held only selected pages of this tome. If it changed its contents as well—she suppressed a shiver, and told herself that she knew all that was necessary.

“My first step must be to find my father’s body,” she said. “Which is where I need your help, Mogget.”

“I have no knowledge of where he met his end,” Mogget stated, with finality. He yawned, and started licking his paws.

Sabriel frowned, and found herself pulling in her lips, a characteristic she had deplored in the unpopular history teacher at school, who often went “thin-lipped” in anger or exasperation.

“Just tell me when you last saw him, and what his plans were.”

“Why don’t you read his diary,” suggested Mogget, in a momentary break from cleaning himself.

“Where is it?” asked Sabriel, excited. A diary would be tremendously helpful.

“He probably took it with him,” replied Mogget. “I haven’t seen it.”

“I thought you had to help me!” Sabriel said, another frown wrinkling across her forehead, reinforcing the thin lips. “Please answer my question.”

“Three weeks ago,” Mogget mumbled, mouth half muffled in the fur of his stomach, pink tongue alternating between words and cleansing. “A messenger came from Belisaere, begging for his help. Something Dead, something that could pass the wards, was preying on them. Abhorsen—I mean the previous Abhorsen, ma’am—suspected that there was more to it than that, Belisaere being Belisaere. But he went.”

“Belisaere. The name’s familiar—it’s a town?”

“A city. The capital. At least it was, when there was still a kingdom.”

“Was?”

Mogget stopped washing, and looked across, eyes narrowing to frowning slits. “What did they teach you in that school? There hasn’t been a King or Queen for two hundred years, and not even a Regent for twenty. That’s why the Kingdom sinks day by day, into a darkness from which no one will rise . . .”

“The Charter—” Sabriel began, but Mogget interrupted with a yowl of derision.

“The Charter crumbles too,” he mewed. “Without a ruler, Charter Stones broken one by one with blood, one of the Great Charters twi . . . twis . . . twisted—”

“What do you mean, one of the Great Charters?” Sabriel interrupted in turn. She had never heard of such a thing. Not for the first time, she also wondered what she’d been taught in school, and why her father had kept so quiet about the state of the Old Kingdom.

But Mogget was silent, as if the things he’d already said had stopped his mouth. For a moment, he seemed to be trying to form words, but nothing came from his small red mouth. Finally, he gave up. “I cannot tell you. It’s part of my binding, curse it! Suffice to say that the whole world slides into evil, and many are helping the slide.”

“And others resist it,” said Sabriel. “Like my father. Like me.”

“It depends what you do,” Mogget said, as if he doubted that someone as patently useless as Sabriel would make much difference. “Not that I care—”

The sound of the trapdoor opening above their heads stopped the cat in mid-speech. Sabriel tensed, looking up to see what was coming down the ladder, then started breathing again as she realized that it was only another Charter sending, its black habit flopping over the rungs of the ladder as it came down. This one, like the guards on the cliff corridor—but unlike the other House servants—had the silver key emblazoned on its chest and back. It bowed to Sabriel, and pointed up.

With a feeling of foreboding, Sabriel knew that it wanted her to look at something from the observatory. Reluctantly, she pushed her chair back and went over to the ladder. A cold draft was blowing in through the open trapdoor, carrying with it the chill of ice from further up the river. Sabriel shivered, as her hands touched the cold metal rungs.

Emerging into the observatory, the chill passed, for the room was still lit by the last, red light of the setting sun, giving an illusion of warmth and making Sabriel squint. She had no memory of this room, so it was with delight that she saw that it was totally walled in glass, or something like it. The bare beams of the red-tiled roof rested on transparent walls, so cleverly morticed together that the roof was like a work of art, complete with the slight draft that reduced its perfection to a more human level.

A large telescope of gleaming glass and bronze dominated the observatory, standing triumphant on a tripod of dark wood and darker iron. A tall observer’s stool stood next to it, and a lectern, a star chart still spilled across it. A thick, toe wriggle-inviting carpet lay under all, a carpet that was also a map of the heavens, showing many different, colorful constellations and whirling planets, woven in thick, richly dyed wool.

The sending, who had followed Sabriel, went to the south wall and pointed out towards the southern riverbank, its pallid, Charter-drawn hand indicating the very spot where Sabriel had emerged after her underground flight from the Mordicant.

Sabriel looked there, shielding her right eye from the west-falling sun. Her gaze crossed the white tops of the river and was drawn to the ledge, despite an inner quailing about what she would see.

As she feared, the Mordicant was still there. But with what she had come to think of as her Death sight, Sabriel sensed it was quiescent, temporarily just an unpleasant statue, a foreground to other, more active shapes that bustled about in some activity behind.

Sabriel stared a little longer, then went to the telescope, narrowly avoiding Mogget, who had somehow appeared underfoot. Sabriel wondered how he had got up the ladder, then dismissed the thought as she concentrated on what was happening outside.

Unaided, she hadn’t been certain what the shapes around the Mordicant were, but they sprang sharply at her through the telescope, drawn so close she felt she could somehow lean forward and snatch them away.

They were men and women—living, breathing people. Each was shackled to a partner’s leg by an iron chain and they shuffled about in these pairs under the dominating presence of the Mordicant. There were scores of them, coming out of the corridor, carrying heavily laden leather buckets or lengths of timber, taking them across the ledge and down the steps to the river. Then they filed back again, buckets empty, timber left behind.

Sabriel depressed the telescope a little, and almost growled in exasperation and anger as she saw the scene by the river. More living slaves were hammering long boxes together from the timber, and these boxes were being filled with earth from the buckets. As each box was filled, it was pushed out to bridge the gap from shore to stepping-stone and locked in place by slaves hammering iron spikes into the stone.

This particular part of the operation was being directed by something that lurked w

ell back from the river, halfway up the steps. A man-shaped blot of blackest night, a moving silhouette. A necromancer’s Shadow Hand, or some free-willed Dead spirit that scorned the use of a body.