She felt relaxed, momentarily carefree, all the troubles that lay ahead and behind her temporarily lost in single-minded contemplation of the clear blue-green water. There was no Dead presence here, no constant awareness of the many doors to Death. Even Charter Magic was dissipated at sea. For a few minutes, she forgot about Touchstone and Mogget. Even her father faded from her mind. There was only the sea’s color, and its coolness on her hand.
“I didn’t really believe it, till I saw Nestowe, and then the Belis Mouth towers,” replied Touchstone. “Now I am afraid—even for a great city that I never believed could really change.”
“I don’t know how much I can tell you, because it involves the Great Charters. Where do I start? With the Queen, I guess. She had four children. Her oldest son, Rogir, was a childhood playmate of mine. He was always the leader, in all our games. He had the ideas—we followed them. Later, when we were growing up, his ideas became stranger, less nice. We grew apart. I went into the Guard; he pursued his own interests. Now I know that those interests must have included Free Magic and necromancy— I never suspected it then. I should have, I know, but he was secretive, and often away.
“Almost definitely, I would say,” added Sabriel.
“Towards the end . . . I mean a few months before it happened . . . well, Rogir had been away for several years. He came back, just before the Midwinter Festival. I was glad to see him, for he seemed to be more like he was as a child. He’d lost interest in the bizarrities that had attracted him. We spent more time together again; hawking, riding, drinking, dancing.
that is . . .”
Sabriel sighed, and looked out at the turquoise sea, then up at the sun, yellow disc on a field of white-streaked blue. A light breeze filled the sail above her, ruffling her hair in passing. Gulls rode it on ahead, to join a squawking mass of their brethren, feeding from a school of fish, sharp silver bursting near the surface.
He knew immediately what she meant.
“So even if we cross the boom in daylight, there could be trouble. I think I’d better reverse my surcoat and hide my helmet wrapping.”
“I’m sure of it,” replied Touchstone. “We’ll see the towers on the opposite shores first. Winding Post, to the south, and Boom Hook to the north.”
“I never knew what happened to you,” replied Mogget. His green eyes met Touchstone’s gaze, and it wasn’t the cat who blinked. “But it must have been Abhorsen. You were insane when we got you out of the reservoir. Driven mad, probably by the breaking of the Great Stones. No memory, nothing. It seems two hundred years is not too long for a rest cure. He must have seen something in you—or the Clayr saw something in the ice . . . ah, that was hard to say. We must be nearing the city, and the sea’s influence lessens. The binding resumes . . .”
“Go on,” said Sabriel, excitedly. “Let’s take advantage of it while we can. The Great Stones would be the stones and mortar of the rhyme— the Third and Fifth Great Charter?”
Touchstone wet his lips, hesitated, then spoke.
Everything was alive, colorful, full of the joy of living. Even the salt tang on her skin, the stink of fish and her own unwashed body, was somehow rich and lively. Far, far removed from Touchstone’s grim past, the threat of Rogir/Kerrigor and the chilling greyness of Death.
So he decided to break the Great Stones, and for that he needed royal blood—his own family’s blood. Or Abhorsen’s, or the Clayr’s, of course, but that would be much harder to get.
“I am,” continued Touchstone miserably, his hands shaking so much the tiller moved, giving the boat a crazy zigzag wake. “There was a . . .
Every few seconds, at the end of a full stroke, her back nearly level with the thwarts, Sabriel snatched a glimpse over her shoulder. They were headed for the narrow passage, between the high but crumbling seawall of Winding Post, and the enormous chain rising out of the swift-flowing sea in aswath of white froth. She could hear the melancholy groaning of the links, like a chorus of pained walruses. Even that gargantuan chain moved at the sea’s whim.
“They’re named after their purpose,” replied Touchstone. “Which makes sense.”
“We’ll have to go in close to the Winding Post tower, unstep the mast and row under the chain where it rises,” Touchstone declared, after studying the chain for several minutes through the telescope, trying to gauge whether it had sunk enough to allow them passage. But even with their relatively shallow-draft boat, it would be too risky, and they daren’t wait for high tide, late in the afternoon. At some time in the past, perhaps when the towers were abandoned, the chain had been winched up to its maximum tension. The engineers who’d made it would have been pleased, for there seemed to be no noticeable slippage.
“I am accurate, not rude,” he snapped, turning his back to them with studied scorn. “And he deserves it.”
Touchstone’s voice faded to a whisper as he continued, and grew hoarse.
“If you say so,” Touchstone said, at the same time. Clearly, he didn’t believe the cat. Belisaere was the royal capital, a huge city, home to at least fifty thousand people. Touchstone couldn’t imagine it fallen, decayed and in the hands of the Dead. Despite his own inner fears and secret knowledge, he couldn’t help but be confident that the Belisaere they were sailing towards would be little different from the two-hundredyear- old images locked in his memory.
“I’m sick of this!” announced Sabriel. “Touchstone, what does Mogget know that I don’t?”
“What happened?” whispered Touchstone.
“Kerrigor was Rogir’s childhood nickname. I made it up, on the day we had the mud fight.
“It is him,” Touchstone said, distantly.
Rogir’s real body was hidden somewhere . . . is hidden somewhere . . . and he wore a Free Magic construct for his physical form.
“You should have told me,” Sabriel said, trying to put as much compassion in her voice as she could. “But perhaps it had to wait for the sea’s freeing of that binding spell. Tell me, the man with the sword and bells, was it the Abhorsen?”
Two hundred years ago, when the last Queen reigned . . . I think . . . I know that I am partly responsible for the failing of the Kingdom, the end of the royal line.”
“Yes,” replied Touchstone, remotely, as if reciting a lesson, “with the Wall. The people, or whatever they were who made the Great Charters, put three in bloodlines and two in physical constructions: the Wall and the Great Stones. All the lesser stones draw their power from one or the other.
She looked at Mogget, thinking of that column of twisting fire. “You were there too, weren’t you, Mogget? Unbound, in your other form.”
“Why are you so rude to Touchstone?”
Sabriel nodded, pleased that Touchstone’s stint as captain of their small vessel had done a lot to remove the servant nonsense out of him and make him more like a normal person. Mogget, for his part, jumped up to the bow without protest, despite the spray that occasionally burst over his head as they cut diagonally across the swell—towards the small triangle of opportunity between shore, sea and chain.
The oars came rattling, splashing in, both Sabriel and Touchstone simply lying down on their backs, with Mogget somewhere between them. The boat rocked and plunged, and the groan of the chain sounded close and terrible.
Sabriel nodded thoughtfully, and slowly took her hand from the sea, as if she were parting from a dear friend.
His full ceremonial name was Rogirek.”
It was half a day from Ilgard to the Belis Mouth, that narrow strait that led to the Sea of Saere. But that was tricky sailing, so they spent the night hove-to just out of sight of Ilgard, to wait for the light of day.
It was just such a pleasure to talk! Touchstone had lapsed back into non-communication for most of the voyage, though he did have a good excuse—handling the fishing boat for eighteen hours a day, even in good weather, didn’t leave much energy for conversation.
“No, Mogget!” exclaimed Sabriel. “I want to know, I need to know, who you are. What’s your connection with the Great . . .”
But I cannot die.’ “He came within an arm’s length of me, and I could only look into his face, look at the evil that lay so close behind those familiar features . . .
By that time, the sun had set. With Rogir, myself, three guards and two ladies-in-waiting, we went down, down into the reservoir where the Great Stones are.”
“In your day,” interrupted Mogget, from his favorite post on the bow. “But this is now, and I am sure that necromancers and worse are not uncommon sights in Belisaere.”
“Hope that the Charter preserves us all.”
“‘You may tear this body,’ he said, as he walked. ‘Rip it, like some poor-made costume.
“No imagination,” said Mogget, sternly. “No thinking ahead. A flaw in your character. A fatal flaw.”
By the morning of the sixth day out of Nestowe, Sabriel was heartily tired of nautical life. They’d sailed virtually non-stop all that time, only putting into shore at noon for fresh water, and only then when it was sunny.
“So the story you told me at Holehallow wasn’t true,” Sabriel whispered, as Touchstone’s voice cracked and faded, and the tears rolled down his face. “The Queen didn’t survive . . .”
“He—or his servants—must have lured my father to Belisaere just before he emerged from Death,” Sabriel thought aloud. “I wonder why he came out into Life so near the Wall?”
“Yes, I was there,” said the cat. “With the Abhorsen of that time. A very powerful Charter Mage, and a master of the bells, but a little too good-hearted to deal with treachery. I had terrible trouble getting him to Belisaere, and in the end, we were not timely enough to save theQueen or her daughters.”
“What!” exclaimed Sabriel. “How could you be?”
“What about the bells?” asked Touchstone.
Three days from Beardy Point to the island of Ilgard, its rocky cliffs climbing sheer from the sea, a grey and pockmarked tenement, home to tens of thousands of seabirds. They passed it late in the afternoon, their single sail stretched to bursting, clinker-built hull heeling well over, bow slicing up a column of spray that salted mouths, eyes and bodies.
“The Great Stones . . . Rogir came and said there was something amiss there, something the Queen must look into. He was her son, but she did not take great account of his wisdom, or believe him when he spoke of trouble with the Stones. She was a Charter Mage and felt nothing wrong. Besides, she was winning at Cranaque, so she told him to wait till morning. Rogir turned to me, asked me to intercede, and, Charter help me, I did. I believed Rogir. I trusted him and my belief convinced the Queen. Finally, she agreed.
“His body must be near the Wall. He would need to be close to it,” Mogget said. “You should know that. To renew the master spell that prevents him from ever passing beyond the Final Gate.”
Two days from Nestowe to Beardy Point, an unprepossessing peninsula whose only interesting features were a sandy-bottomed beach and a clear stream. Devoid of life, it was also devoid of the Dead. Here, for the first time, Sabriel could no longer sense the pursuing Mordicant. A good, strong, south-easterly had propelled them, reaching northwards, at too fast a pace for it to follow.
He could have confined himself to breaking a few of the lesser stones, somewhere far away, but that would only give him a tiny area to prey on, and the Abhorsen would soon hunt him down.
He leaned past her, to draw the main sheet tighter, right hand slightly nudging the tiller to take advantage of a shift in the wind. “They’re fairly obvious, to say the least.”
“The other two guards were Rogir’s men,”
Touchstone continued, his voice wet with tears, muffled with sorrow. “They attacked me, but Vlare—one of the ladies-in-waiting—threw herself across them. I went mad, battle-mad, berserk. I killed both guards. Rogir had jumped from the barge and was wading to the Stones, holding the cup. His four sorcerers were waiting, dark-cowled, around the third stone, the next to be broken. I couldn’t reach him in time, I knew. I threw my sword. It flew straight and true, taking him just above the heart. He screamed, the echo going on and on and he turned back towards me! Transfixed by my sword, but still walking, holding that vile cup of blood up, as if offering me a drink.
“Yes,” replied Sabriel, remembering the passages from The Book of the Dead. She shivered, but suppressed it, before it became a racking sob. Inside, she felt like screaming, crying. She wanted to flee back to Ancelstierre, cross the Wall, leave the Dead and magic behind, go as far south as possible. But she quelled these feelings, and said, “An Abhorsen defeated him once. I can do so again. But first, we must find my father’s body.”
“I’ll wear a cloak—” Sabriel started to say.
Sabriel, one moment looking up at the clear, blue sky, in the next saw nothing but green, weedstrewn iron above her. When the swell lifted the boat up, she could have reached out and touched the great boom-chain of Belis Mouth.
We can speak of the Great Charters, at least for a little while. I had forgotten it was so.”
“It must be difficult for you,” she said, almost to herself, not really expecting him to answer.
“There may also be people working for, or in alliance with, the Dead,” Sabriel added thoughtfully.
“I don’t know,” said Touchstone, who couldn’t see that Sabriel was joking. “No necromancer would be let into the city, or would stay alive, in—”
“You’ll have to tell me eventually,” said Sabriel, a touch of the prefect entering her voice.
“Mogget, go to the bow and keep a lookout for anything in the water. Sabriel, could you please watch the shore and the tower, to guard against attack.”
“Then, late one afternoon—one cold, crisp afternoon, near sunset—I was on duty, guarding the Queen and her ladies. They were playing Cranaque. Rogir came to her, and asked her to come with him down to the place where the Great Stones are . . . hey, I can say it!”
“Too late,” said Mogget. He started cleaning his fur, pink tongue darting out, bright color against white fur.
Fortunately, the weather had been kind.
“There was terrible wrong down there, but it was Rogir’s doing, not his discovery. There are six Great Stones and two were just being broken, broken with the blood of his own sisters, sacrificed by his Free Magic minions as we approached. I saw their last seconds, the faint hope in their clouding eyes, as the Queen’s barge came floating across the water. I felt the shock of the Stones breaking and I remember Rogir, stepping up behind the Queen, a saw-edged dagger striking so swiftly across her throat. He had a cup, a golden cup, one of the Queen’s own, to catch the blood, but I was too slow, too slow . . .”
“We’ll be able to see the city soon,” Touchstone said, interrupting her mental holiday. “If the towers are still standing.”
“There is a boom-chain across the Belis Mouth,” Touchstone explained, as he raised the sail and Sabriel hauled the sea anchor in over the bow. The sun was rising behind him, but had not yet pulled itself out of the sea, so he was no more than a dim shadow in the stern. “It was built to keep pirates and suchlike out of the Sea of Saere. You won’t believe the size of it—I can’t imagine how it was forged, or strung across.”
The great boom-chain still stretched across the strait. Huge iron links, each as wide and long as the fishing boat, rose green and barnaclebefouled out of the water and up into each of the towers. Glimpses of it could be seen in the middle of the Mouth, when the swell dipped, and a length of chain shone slick and green in the wave trough, like some lurking monster of the deep.
“There is one thing I would like to ask. Who put my spirit in Death, and made my body the figurehead?”
“I do not know,” replied Mogget. “Your father thought so.”
“Will it still be there?” Sabriel asked, cautiously, not wanting to prevent Touchstone’s strangely talkative mood.
“Because he was the Queen’s son, clever, and very powerful, he almost achieved his aims. Two of the six Great Stones were broken. The Queen and her daughters were killed. Abhorsen intervened a little too late. True, he did manage to drive him deep into Death—but since his true body has never been found, Rogir has continued to exist. Even from Death, he has overseen the dissolution of the Kingdom—a kingdom without a royal family, with one of the Great Charters crippled, corrupting and weakening all the others. He wasn’t really beaten that night, in the reservoir. Just delayed, and for two hundred years he’s been trying to come back, trying to re-enter Life—”
Then they were past, and Touchstone was already pushing out his oar, Mogget moving to the bow. Sabriel wanted to lie there, just looking up at the sky, but the collapsed seawall of Winding Post was no more than an oar-length away. She sat up and resumed her duty as a rower.
“What did happen?”
They came in as close as they dared before unstepping the mast. The swell had diminished, for the Belis Mouth was well-sheltered by the two arms of land, but the tide had turned, and a tidal race was beginning to run from the ocean to the Saere Sea. So, even without mast and sail, they were borne rapidly towards the chain; Touchstone rowing with all his strength just to keep steerage way. After a moment, this clearly became impossible, so Sabriel took one of the oars, and they rowed together, with Mogget yowling directions.
“Who decides whether to let vessels past the chain?” asked Sabriel. Already, she was thinking ahead, wondering about Belisaere. Could it be like Nestowe—the city abandoned, riddled with the Dead? “Ah,” said Touchstone. “I hadn’t thought about that. In my time, there was a Royal Boom Master, with a force of guards and a squadron of small, picket ships. If, as Mogget says, the city has fallen into anarchy . . .”
At first, the towers were no more than dark smudges, that grew taller as wind and wave carried the boat towards them. Through her telescope, Sabriel saw that they were made from a beautiful, rosy-pink stone that once must have been magnificent. Now they were largely blackened by fire; their majesty vanished. Winding Post had lost the top three storys, from seven; Boom Hook stood as tall as ever, but sunlight shone through gaping holes, showing the interior to be a gutted ruin. There was no sign of any garrison, toll collector, windlass mules, or anything alive.
then there was blinding white light, the sound of bells—bells like yours, Sabriel—and voices, harsh voices . . . Rogir flinching back, the cup dropped, blood floating on the water like oil. I turned, saw guardsmen on the stairs; a burning, twisting column of white fire; a man with sword and bells . . . then I fainted, or was knocked unconscious. When I came to, I was in Holehallow, seeing your face. I don’t know how I got there, who put me there . . . I still only remember in shreds and patches.”
“We shall have to be very careful,” Sabriel said at last, “and hope that . . . what was it you said to the Elder of Nestowe, Touchstone?”
He paused, took a deep breath, sat up a little straighter, and continued, as if reporting to a senior officer.
“Rogir was already one of the Dead when he came back to Belisaere,” Mogget said wearily, as if he were telling a cynical yarn to a crew of hard-bitten cronies. “But only an Abhorsen would have known it, and he wasn’t there.
Touchstone was silent, knuckles white on the tiller, eyes focused on the distant horizon, as if he could already see the towers of Belisaere.
Her voice locked up in her throat and a star- tled gargle was the only thing that came out.
That confidence took a blow as the Belis Mouth towers became visible above the blue line of the horizon, on opposite shores of the strait.
“Yes,” interrupted Mogget. He looked tired, like an alley cat that has suffered one kick too many.“The sea washes all things clear, for a time.
“I’ll just look like a necromancer,” Sabriel replied. “A salty, unwashed necromancer.”
The water changed color in the Sea of Saere.
“Mogget,” Sabriel said indignantly, angry at the cat for crushing yet another possible conversation.
“Two hundred years gone, the Kingdom slowly falling into ruin while you slept.”
“It was stupidity on my part, not evil, milady.
Sabriel trailed her hand in it, marveling at its clear turquoise sheen. For all its color, it was incredibly transparent. The water was very deep, but she could see down the first three or four fathoms, watching small fish dance under the bubbles of their boat’s wake.
There was silence for a moment, save for the wind in the canvas and the quiet hum of the rigging.
Nights were spent under sail, or, when exhaustion claimed Touchstone, hove-to with a sea anchor, the unsleeping Mogget standing watch.
Touchstone wiped his hand across his eyes and looked at Mogget.
It had been a relatively uneventful five days.
“It can’t be that bad, surely?”
“What happened?”
“Port a little,” yowled Mogget. Touchstone backed his oar for a moment, then the cat jumped down, yelling, “Ship oars and duck!”
Mogget hissed and the fur bristled on his back.
“He’s succeeded, hasn’t he?” interrupted Sabriel. “He’s the thing called Kerrigor, the one Abhorsens have been fighting for generations, trying to keep in Death. He is the one who came back, the Greater Dead who murdered the patrol near Cloven Crest, the master of the Mordicant.”
“No,” mumbled Touchstone. “But I didn’t mean to lie. It was all jumbled up in my head.”
“Somewhere along the path of his studies, he’d swapped real Life for power and, like all the Dead, he needed to take life all the time to stay out of Death. But the Charter made it very difficult for him to do that anywhere in the Kingdom. So he decided to break the Charter.
“Not very imaginative names,” commented Sabriel, unable to help herself from interrupting.
“I don’t know,” replied Touchstone. “Probably.”
