chapter ix

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    Lanterns lit the study, old brass lanterns that burned with Charter Magi place of oil. Smokeless, silent aernal, they provided as good a light as the electric bulbs of Aierre.

    Books lihe walls, following the curves of the tower around, save for where the stair rose from below, and the ladder climbed to the observatory above.

    A redwood table sat in the middle of the room, its legs scaled and beady-eyed, oral flames lig from the mouths of the dragonheads that gripped each er of the tabletop.

    An inkwell, pens, papers and a pair of bronze map dividers lay upoable. Chairs of the same red wood surrou, their upholstery black with a variation on the silver key motif.

    The table was one of the few things Sabriel remembered from her childhood visits. “Dragon desk” her father had called it, and she’d ed herself around one of those dragon legs, her head not even reag the underside of the table.

    Sabriel ran her hand over the smooth, cool wood, feeling both her memory of it and the curreion, then she sighed, pulled up a chair and put dowhree books she’d tucked under her arm. Two, she put together close to her, the other she pushed to the ter of the table. This third book came from the single glassed-in et among the bookshelves and now lay like some quiest predator, possibly asleep, possibly waiting t. Its binding was of pale greeher and Charter marks burned in the silver clasps that held it closed. The Book of the Dead.

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

    There were twenty chapters in eae.

    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 plao talk to Mogget, then study for an hour or two, befoing back to bed. Even four or five waking hours seemed too much after her ordeal, and the loss of sciousness 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 flig 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 dire, but her normally excellent memory held only selected pages of this tome. If it ged its tents 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 kn<cite></cite>owledge of where he met his end,” Mogget stated, with finality. He yawned, and started lig his paws.

    Sabriel frowned, and found herself pulling in her lips, a characteristic she had deplored in the unpopular history teacher at school, who ofte “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 ing 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, reinf the thin lips. “Please answer my question.”

    “Three weeks ago,” Mogget mumbled, mouth  half muffled in the fur of his stomach, pink toernatiween words and sing.

    “A messenger came from Belisaere, begging for his help. Something Dead, something that could pass the wards, reying 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 whio one will rise . . .”

    “The Charter—” Sabriel began, but Mogget iｐ://.9９lｉｂ?rrupted with a yowl of derision.

    “The Charter <bdo>藏书网</bdo>crumbles too,” he mewed.

    “Without a ruler, Charter Stones broken one by oh 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 ot 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 ing 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 uhe 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 khat it wanted her to look at something from the observatory. Relutly, she pushed her chair bad 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 etal 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 redtiled roof rested on transparent walls, so cleverly morticed together that the roof was like a work of art, plete with the slight draft that reduced its perfe to a more human level.

    A large telescope of gleaming glass and bronze domihe observatory, standing triumphant on a tripod of dark wood and darker iron. A tall  observer’s stool stood o it, and a le, a star chart still spilled across it. A thick, tle-inviting carpet lay under all, a carpet that was also a map of the heavens, showing many different, colorful stellations and whirling plas, 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 indig the very spot where Sabriel had emerged after her underground flight from the Mordit.

    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 Mordit was still there.

    But with what she had e to think of as her Death sight, Sabriel se was quiest, temporarily just an unpleasant statue, a fround to other, more active shapes that bustled about in some activity behind.

    Sabriel stared a little loheo the telescope, narrowly avoiding Mogget, who had somehoeared underfoot. Sabriel wondered  how he had got up the ladder, then dismissed the thought as she trated on what was happening outside.

    Unaided, she hadn’t beeain what the shapes around the Mordit 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  and they shuffled about in these pairs uhe dominating presence of the Mordit. There were scores of them, ing out of the corridor, carrying heavily ladeher buckets or lengths of timber, taking them across the ledge and doweps 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 se 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 ushed out te 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 well back from the river, half the steps. A manshaped blot of blackest night, a moving silhouette.

    A neancer’s Shadow Hand, or some free-willed Dead spirit that sed the use of a body.

    As Sabriel watched, the last of four boxes was thrust out to the first stepping-stone, spiked in place, and then ed to its three adjat fellows. One slave, fastening the , overbalanced a headfirst into the water, his shackle-mate following a sed later. Their screams, if any, were drowned by the roar of the waterfall as its waters took their bodies. A few seds later, Sabriel felt their lives snuffed out.

    The other slaves at the river’s edge stopped w for a momeher shocked at the sudden loss, or momentarily made more afraid of the river than their masters. But the Shadow Hand oeps moved towards them, its legs like treacle, p down the slope, lapping over each step in turn. It gestured for some of the nearer slaves to walk across the earth-filled boxes to the stepping-stohey did so, to cluster unhappily amid the spray.

    The Shadow Haated then, but the Mordit on the ledge above seemed to stir and rock forward a little, so the shadowy abomination gingerly trod on the boxes—and walked across to the stepping-stoaking no scathe from the running water.

    “Grave dirt,” ented Mogget, who obviously didn’t he telescope. “Carted up by the villagers from Qyrre and Roble’s Town. I wonder if they’ve got enough to cross all the stones.”

    “Grave dirt,” ented Sabriel bleakly, watg a fresh round of slaves arriving with buckets and more timber. “I had fotten it could e the running water. I thought . . . I thought I would be safe here, for a time.”

    “Well, you are,” said Mogget. “It’ll take at least until tomorrow evening before their bridge is plete, particularly allowing for a couple of hours off around noon, when the Dead will have to hide if it isn’t overcast. But this shows planning, and that means a leader. Still, every Abhorsen has enemies. It may just be a petty neancer with a better brain for strategy than most.”

    “I slew a Dead thing at Clove,” Sabriel  said slowly, thinking aloud. “It said it would have its revenge and spoke of telling the servants of Kerrigor. Do you know that name?”

    “I know it,” spat Mogget, tail quivering straight out behind him. “But I ot speak of it, except to say it is one of the Greater Dead, and your father’s most ter..rible enemy. Do not say it lives again!”

    “I don’t know,” replied Sabriel, looking down at the cat, whose body seemed twisted, as if in turmoil between and aance.

    “Why ’t you tell me more? The binding?”

    “A . . . a perversion of . . . the g . . . g . . . yes,”

    Mogget croaked out with effort. Though his green eyes seemed to grow luminous and fiery with a his own feeble explanation, he could say no more.

    “Coils within coils,” remarked Sabriel thoughtfully. There seemed little doubt that some evil po against her, from the moment she’d crossed the Wall—or even before that, if her father’s disappearance was anything to go by.

    She looked back through the telescope again and took some heart in the slowing of the work as the last light faded, though at the same time  she felt a pang of sympathy for the poor people the Dead had enslaved. Many would probably freeze to death, or die of exhaustion, only to be brought back as dull-witted Hands. Only those who went over the waterfall would escape that fate. Truly, the Old Kingdom was a terrible place, when eveh did not mean ao slavery and despair.

    “Is there another way out?” she asked, swivelling the telescope around  degrees to look at the northern bank. There were stepping-stones going there, too, and another dh on the riverbank, but there were also dark shapes clustered on the ledge by the door. Four or five Shadow Hands, too many for Sabriel to fight through alone.

    “It seems not,” she answered herself grimly.

    “What of defehen?  the sendings fight?”

    “The sendings don’t o fight,” replied Mogget. “For there is another defehough it is a rather strictive one. And there is oher way out, though you probably won’t like it.”

    The sendio her nodded and pantomimed something with its arm that looked like  a snake wiggling through grass.

    “What’s that?” asked Sabriel, fighting back a sudden urge to break into hysterical laughter.

    “The defense or the way out?”

    “The defense,” replied Mogget. “The river itself. It  be io rise almost to the height of the island walls—four times your height above the stepping-stones. Nothing  pass such a flood, in or out, till it subsides, in a matter of weeks.”

    “So how would I get out?” asked Sabriel. “I ’t wait weeks!”

    “One of your aors built a flying device. A Paperwing, she called it. You  use that, launched out over the waterfall.”

    “Oh,” said Sabriel, in a little voice.

    “If you do wish to raise the river,” Mogget tinued, as if he hadn’t noticed Sabriel’s sudden silehen we must begiual immediately. The flood es from meltwater and the mountains are many leagues upstream. If we call the waters now, the flood will be on us by dusk tomorrow.”

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