chapter xv

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    The stair was to the north of the middle ship of the four. cealed by both magid artifice, it seemed to be little more than a particularly wet patch of the damp limestohat f<cite>..</cite>ormed the sinkhole wall, but you could walk right through it, for it was really an open door with steps winding up behind.

    They decided to take these steps the  m, after another day of rest. Sabriel was eager to move on, for she felt that her father’s peril could only be increasing, but she was realistiough to assess her own need for recovery time. Touchstooo, probably needed a rest, she thought. She’d tried to ore information out of him while they’d searched for the steps, but he was clearly relut to even open his mouth, and when he did, Sabriel found his humble apologies ever more irritating. After the door was found she gave up altogether, and sat in the grass he spring, reading her father’s books on Charter Magic. The Book of the Dead stayed ed in oilskin. Even then, she felt its presence, brooding in her pack . . .

    Touchstoayed at the opposite end of the ship, he bow, perf a series of feng exercises with his twin swords, and some stretches and minor acrobatics. Mogget watched him from the undergrowth, green eyes glittering, as if i on a mouse.

    Lunch was a ary and versational failure.

    Dried beef strips, garnished with watercress from the fringes of the spring, and monosyllabic responses from Touchstone. He eve bailady,” despite Sabriel’s repeated requests to use her name. Mogget didn’t help by calling her Abhorsen. After lunch, everyo back to their respective activities. Sabriel to her book, Touchstoo his exercises and Mogget to his watg.

    Dinner was not something anyone had looked forward to. Sabriel tried talking to Mogget, but he seemed to be ied with Touchstone’s  retice, though not with his servility. As soon as they’d eaten, everyohe raked-together coals of the campfire—Touchstoo the west, Mogget north and Sabriel east—ao sleep on as fortable a stretch of ground as could be discovered.

    Sabriel woke on<samp></samp> the night. Without getting up, she saw that the fire had been rekindled and Touchsto beside it, staring into the flames, his eyes refleg the capering, gold-red light. His face looked drawn, almost ill.

    “Are you all right?” Sabriel asked quietly, propping herself up on one elbow.

    Touchstoarted, rocked ba his heels, and almost fell over. For once, he didn’t sound like a sulky servant.

    “Not really. I remember what I would not, and fet what I should not. Five me.”

    Sabriel didn’t answer. He had spoken the last two words to the fire, not to her.

    “Please, go back to sleep, milady,” Touchstone tinued, slipping back to his servile role. “I will wake you in the m.”

    Sabriel opened her mouth to say something scathing about the arrogance of pretended humility, then shut it, abbr>藏书网</abbr>nd subsided bader  her bla. Just trate on resg Father, she told herself. That is the one important thing.

    Rescue Abhorsen. Don’t worry about Touchstone’s problems, get’s curious nature.

    Rescue Abhorsen. Rescue Abhorsen. Rescue Abhors . . . rescue . . .

    “Wake up!” Mogget said, right in her ear. She rolled n him, but he leapt across her head aed it i<samp></samp>her ear. “Wake up!”

    “I’m awake,” grumbled Sabriel. She sat up with the bla ed around her, feeling the pre-dawn chill on her fad hands. It was still extremely dark, save for the uneven light of the fire and the fai brushings of dawn light above the sinkhole. Touchstone was already making the pe. He’d also washed, and shaved—using a dagger from the look of the nicks and cuts on his  and neck.

    “Good m,” he said. “This will be ready in five minutes, milady.”

    Sabriel groa that wain. Feeling like a shambling, bla-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 pleted the waking up process without kindness, Sabriel exposing herself to it and the marginally warmer air for no more thaen seds it took to shed undershirt, wash a dressed again.

    , awake and clothed, she returo the campfire and ate her share of the pe. Then Touchstoe, while Sabriel buckled on armor, sword and bells. Mogget lay he fire, warming his white-furred belly. Not for the first time, Sabriel wondered if he o eat at all. He obviously liked food, but he seemed to eat for amusement, rather than sustenance.

    Touchstone tinued being a servant after breakfast, ing pot and spoon, queng the fire and putting everything away. But when he was about to swing the pa his back, Sabriel stopped him.

    “No, Touchsto’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  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 iating 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 relutly, wheopped 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 bad shoulders, shuddering slightly at the paduced layer of sweat on her back, greasy under armor, tunic, shirt and undershirt. She picked up her dle from the bend stepped up.

    “No,” said Touchstoepping 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 ing back,” Sabriel ented, 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 tinued up the stairs. Sabriel followed, Mogget at her heels. Now that she wasn’t lumbered by her pack, she felt more alert. Watg Touchstone, she saw him pause occasionally and mutter some words under his breath. Each time, there was the faint, featherlight touch of Charter Magic. Subtle magic, much cleverer than iunnel below. Harder to deted probably much more deadly, Sabriel thought.

    Now she k was there, she also picked up the faiion of Death. This stair had seen killings, a long, long, time ago.

    Finally,<q></q> 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 rown lattice that had once beeo air and sky.

    “That’s the outside door,” Touchstone said, unnecessarily. He snuffed out his dle, 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, indig 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  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 selfloathing.

    “I’d still be sitting by the spring, watg it bubble, if you hadn’t e along.”

    “You would have found the way out,”

    Touuttered. “get 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, posing his face. “I’m sorry, Mogget. Milady.”

    “Please, please, just Sabriel,” she said tiredly.

    “I’ve only just left school—I’m oeen! Calling me milady seems ridiculous.”

    “Sabriel,” Touchstone said tentatively. “I will try to remember. ‘Milady’ is a habit . . . it   reminds me of my pla 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 ag 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, slidiween her legs and over to the thin lihat marked the divisioweewo 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 oal-studded wood.

    Sabriel hesitated, then did the same against the right.

    “Owo, three, push!” announced Mogget.

    Sabriel pushed on “three” and Touchstone on “push,” so their bined effort took several seds to synize. Then the doors creaked slowly open, sunshine spilling through in a bright bar, climbing from floor to ceiling, dust motes dang in its progress.

    “It feels strange,” said Touchstohe wood hummih his hands like plucked lute strings.

    “I  hear voices,” exclaimed Sabriel at the same time, her ears full of half-caught words, laughter, distant singing.

    “I  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 st of pirees 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 thi the ground, pinees peeking through every few paces, like skulls ploughed up on some a 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, baear 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 thousa above the coastal plain. In fact, the area arouowe, where we are headed, is mostly below sea level and has been reclaimed.”

    “Yes,” said Touchstone. “I remember. Long Dyke, the raised als, the wind pumps to raise the water—”

    “You’re both very informative for a ge,”

    remarked Sabriel. “Would one of you care to tell me something I really want to know, like what are the Great Charters?”

    “I ’t,” Mogget and Touchstone said together.

    Then Touchstone tinued, haltingly, “There is a spell . . . a binding on us. 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,” ented 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 Aierre 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 ooo the . It was cool uhe pines, but pleasant, the stant presence of the Charter  Stones a reassuriion to Sabriel and Touchstone, who could sehem 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 tensioime they left the ambience of one and moved to another, a stark picture always flashing into her head—the bloodstained, riven stone of Clove.

    The last stoood 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 o 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 owe, maintained by a work of raised als, pumps and dykes. The village itself lay three-quarters of a mile away, high on anranite bluff, the harbor out of sight oher 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 vaill 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 keehaelescope in Sabriel’s pack.

    “owe’s Charter Stone must be broken,”

    Sabriel said, mouth tight, words cold. “And I  smell a certain sten the breeze. There are Dead in the village.”

    “A boat would be the quickest way to Belisaere, and I am reasonably fident of my sailing,” Touchstone remarked. “But if the Dead are there, shouldn’t we . . .”

    “We’ll go down a a boat,” Sabriel announced firmly. “While the sun is high.”

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