chapter xviii

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    By the m of the sixth day out of owe, 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 the was sunny.

    Nights were spent under sail, or, when exhaustion claimed Touchstone, hove-to with a sea anchor, the unsleeping Mogget standing watch.

    Fortunately, the weather had been kind.

    It had been a relatively uful five days.

    Two days from owe to Beardy Point, an unprepossessing peninsula whose only iiures were a sandy-bottomed bead a clear stream. Devoid of life, it was also devoid of the Dead. Here, for the first time, Sabriel could no longer sehe pursuing Mordit. A good, strong, south-easterly had propelled them, reag northwards, at too fast a pace for it to follow.

    Three days from Beardy Point to the island of Ilgard, its rocky cliffs climbing sheer from the sea, a grey and pockmarked te, home to tens of thousands of seabirds. They passed it late iernoon, their single sail stretched to bursting, ker-built hull heeling well over, bow slig up a n of spray that salted mouths, eyes and bodies.

    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, t<var></var>o wait for the light of day.

    “There is a boom- across the Belis Mouth,” Touchstone explained, as he raised the sail and Sabriel hauled the sea anchor ihe 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 iern. “It was built to keep pirates and suchlike out of the Sea of Saere. You won’t believe the size of it—I ’t imagine how it was fed, or strung across.”

    “Will it still be there?” Sabriel asked, cautiously, not wanting to prevent Touchstone’s straalkative mood.

    “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.”

    “Not very imaginative names,” ented Sabriel, uo help herself from interrupting.

    It was just such a pleasure to talk! Touchstone had lapsed bato non-unication for most of the voyage, though he did have a good excuse—handling the fishing boat fhteen hours a day, even in good weather, didn’t leave muergy for versation.

    “They’re named after their purpose,” replied Touchstone. “Which makes sense.”

    “Who decides whether to let vessels past the ?” asked Sabriel. Already, she was thinking ahead, w about Belisaere. Could it be like owe—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 . . .”

    “There may also be people w for, or in alliah, the Dead,” Sabriel added thoughtfully.

    “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 ing.”

    “What about the bells?” asked Touchstone.

    He leaned past her, to draw the maiighter, right hand slightly nudging the tiller to take advantage of a shift in the wind. “They’re fairly obvious, to say the least.”

    “I’ll just look like a neancer,” Sabriel replied. “A salty, unwashed neancer.”

    “I don’t know,” said Touchstone, who couldn’t see that Sabriel was joking. “No neancer would be let into the city, or would stay alive, in—”

    “In your day,” interrupted Mogget, from his favorite post on the bow. “But this is now, and I am sure that neancers and worse are not unon sights in Belisaere.”

    “I’ll wear a cloak—” Sabriel started to say.

    “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 imagi fallen, decayed and in the hands of the  Dead. Despite his own inner fears a knowledge, he couldn’t help but be fident that the Belisaere they were sailing towards would be little different from the two-hundredyear- old images locked in his memory.

    That fideook a blow as the Belis Mouth towers became visible above the blue line of the horizon, on opposite shores of the strait.

    At first, the towers were no more than dark smudges, that grew<bdi></bdi> taller as wind and wave carried the boat towards them. Through her telescope, Sabriel saw that they were made from a beautiful, rosy-pink stohat once must have been magnifit. Now they were largely blaed by fire; their majesty vanished. Winding Post had lost the top three storys, from seven; Boom Hook stood as tall as ever, but sunlight shohrough gaping holes, showing the interior to be a gutted ruin. There was no sign of any garrison, toll collector, windlass mules, or anything alive.

    The great boom- 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 tlimpses of it could be seen in the  middle of the Mouth, when the swell dipped, and a length of  shone slid green in the wave trough, like some lurking monster of the deep.

    “We’ll have to go in close to the Winding Post tower, uhe mast and row uhe  where it rises,” Touchstone declared, after studying the  for several mihrough 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 fh tide, late iernoon. At some time in the past, perhaps wheowers were abahe  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.

    “Mogget, go to the bow and keep a lookout for anything ier. Sabriel, could you please watch the shore and the tower, to guard against attack.”

    Sabriel nodded, pleased that Touchstone’s stint as captain of their small vessel had done a lot to remove the servant nonse 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 .

    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 o to the Saere Sea. So, even without mast and sail, they were borne rapidly towards the ; 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 dires.

    Every few seds, at the end of a full stroke, her baearly 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  rising out of the swift-flowing sea in a swath of white froth. She could hear the melancholy groaning of the links, like a chorus of pained walruses. Even that gargantuan   moved at the sea’s whim.

    “Port a little,” yowled Mogget. Touchstone backed his oar for a moment, the jumped down, yelling, “Ship oars and duck!”

    The oars came rattling, splashing in, both Sabriel and Touchstone simply lying down on their backs, with Mogget somewhere betweehe boat rocked and plunged, and the groan of the  sounded close and terrible.

    Sabriel, one moment looking up at the clear, blue sky, in the  saw nothing but greerewn iron above her. When the swell lifted the boat up, she could have reached out and touched the great boom- of Belis Mouth.

    Then they were past, and Touchstone was already pushing out his oar, Mogget moving to the bow. Sabriel wao 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.

    The water ged color in the Sea of Saere.

    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, watg small fish dander the bubbles of their boat’s wake.

    She felt relaxed, momentarily carefree, all the troubles that lay ahead and behiemporarily lost in single-minded plation of the clear blue-green water. There was no Dead presence here, no stant awareness of the many doors to Death. Even Charter Magic was dissipated at sea. For a few minutes, she fot about Touchstone and Mogget. Even her father faded from her mind. There was only the sea’s color, and its ess on her hand.

    “We’ll be able to see the city soon,” Touchstone said, interrupting her mental holiday. “If the towers are still standing.”

    Sabriel houghtfully, and slowly took her hand from the sea, as if she were parting from a dear friend.

    “It must be difficult for you,” she said, almost to herself, not really expeg him to answer.

    “Two hundred years gohe Kingdom slowly falling into ruin while you slept.”

    “I didn’t really believe it, till I saw owe, and then the Belis Mouth towers,” replied Touchstone. “Now I am afraid—even freat city that I never believed could really ge.”

    “No imagination,” said Mogget, sternly. “No thinking ahead. A flaw in your character. A fatal flaw.”

    “Mogget,” Sabriel said indignantly, angry at the cat for crushi another possible versation.

    “Why are you so rude to Touchstone?”

    Mogget hissed and the fur bristled on his back.

    “I am accurate, not rude,” he surning his back to them with studied s. “And he deserves it.”

    “I’m sick of this!” announced Sabriel. “Touchstone, what does Mogget know that I don’t?”

    Touchstone was silent, knuckles white oiller, eyes focused on the distant horizon, as if he could already see the towers of Belisaere.

    “You’ll have to tell me eventually,” said Sabriel, a touch of the prefetering her voice.

    “It ’t be that bad, surely?”

    Touchsto his lips, hesitated, then spoke.

    “It was stupidity on my part, not evil, milady.

    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.”

    “What!” exclaimed Sabriel. “How could you be?”

    “I am,” tiouiserably, his hands shaking so much the tiller moved, giving the boat a crazy zigzag wake. “There was a . . .

    that is . . .”

    He paused, took a deep breath, sat up a little straighter, and tinued, as if rep to a senior officer.

    “I don’t know how much I  tell you, because it involves the Great Charters. Where do I start? With the Queen, I guess. She had four children. Her oldest sir, was a childhood playmate of mine. He was always the leader, in all ames. He had the ideas—we followed them. Later, when we were growing up, his ideas became stranger, less nice. We greart. I went into the Guard; he pursued his own is. Now I know that those is must have included Free Magid neancy— I never suspected it then. I should have, I know, but he was secretive, and often away.

    “Towards the end . . . I mean a few months before it happened . . . well, Rogir had been away for several years. He came back, ju<samp>藏书网</samp>st 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 i in the bizarrities that had attracted him. We spent more time together again; hawking, riding, drinking, dang.

    “Then, late oernoon—one cold, crisp afternoon, n<dfn>９９ｌib?</dfn>ear su—I was on duty, guarding the Queen and her ladies. They were playing aque. Rogir came to her, and asked her to e with him down to the place where the Great Stones are . . . hey, I  say it!”

    “Yes,” interrupted Mogget. He looked tired, like an alley cat that has suffered one kiany. “The sea washes all things clear, for a time.

    eak of the Great Charters, at least for a little while. I had fotten it was so.”

    “Go on,” said Sabriel, excitedly. “Let’s take advantage of it while we . The Great Stones would be the stones and mortar of the rhyme— the Third and Fifth Great Charter?”

    “Yes,” replied Touchstone, remotely, as if reg a lesson, “with the Wall. The people, or whatever they were who made the Great Charters, put three in bloodlines and two in physical strus: the Wall and the Great Stones. All the lesser stones draw their power from one or the other.

    “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 at of his wisdom, or believe him when he spoke of trouble with the Stones. She was a Charter Mage a nothing wrong. Besides, she was winning at aque, so she told him to wait till m. Rogir turo me, asked me to intercede, and, Charter help me, I did. I believed Rogir. I trusted him and my belief vihe Queen. Finally, she agreed.

    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.”

    Touchstone’s voice faded to a whisper as he tinued, and grew hoarse.

    “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 Magiions as roached. I saw their last seds, 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 . . .”

    “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 . . .”

    “No,” mumbled Touchstone. “But I didn’t mean to lie. It was all jumbled up in my head.”

    “What did happen?”

    “The other two guards were ?９9lib?Rogir’s men,”

    Touchstone tinued, 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 stohe o 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 aurned back towards me! Transfixed by my sword, but still walking, holding that vile cup of blood up, as if  me a drink.

    “‘You may tear this body,’ he said, as he walked. ‘Rip it, like some poor-made e.

    But I ot 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 . . .

    then there was blinding white light, the sound of bells—bells like yours, Sabriel—and voices, harsh voices . . . Rogir fling back, the cup dropped, blood floating oer like oil. I turned, saw guardsmen oairs; a burning, twisting n of white fire; a man with sword and bells . . . then I fainted, or was knocked unscious. 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.”

    “You should have told me,” Sabriel said, trying to put as mupassion 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?”

    “I don’t know,” replied Touchstone. “Probably.”

    “Almost definitely, I would say,” added Sabriel.

    She looked at Mogget, thinking of that n of twisting fire. “You were there too, weren’t you, Mogget? Unbound, in your other form.”

    “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 the Queen or her daughters.”

    “What happened?” whispered Touchstone.

    “What happened?”

    “Rogir was already one of the Dead when he came back to Belisaere,” Mogget said wearily, as if he were telling a ical yarn to a crew of hard-bitten ies. “But only an Abhorsen would have known it, and he wasn’t there.

    Rogir’s real body was hidden somewhere . . . is hidden somewhere . . . and he wore a Free Magistruct for his physical form.

    “Somewhere along the path of his studies, he’d sed real Life for power and, like all the Dead, he o 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.

    He could have fined 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.

    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.

    “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 mao drive him deep into Death—but since his true body has never been found, Rogir has tio 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 e back, trying to re-enter Life—”

    “He’s succeeded, hasn’t he?” interrupted Sabriel. “He’s the thing called Kerrigor, the one Abhorsens have been fighting feions,  trying to keep ih. He is the one who came back, the Greater Dead who murdered the patrol near Clove, the master of the Mordit.”

    “I do not know,” replied Mogget. “Your father thought so.”

    “It is him,” Touchstone said, distantly.

    “Kerrigor was Rogir’s childhood niame. I made it up, on the day we had the mud fight.

    His full ceremonial name was Rogirek.”

    “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 he Wall?”

    “His body must be he Wall. He would o be close to it,” Mogget said. “You should know that. To rehe master spell that prevents him from ever passing beyond the Final Gate.”

    “Yes,” replied Sabriel, remembering the passages from The Book of the Dead. She shivered, but suppressed it, before it became a rag sob. Inside, she felt like screaming, g. She wao flee back to Aierre, cross the Wall, leave the Dead and magic behind, go as far south as possible. But she quelled these feelings,  and said, “An Abhorseed him once. I  do so again. But first, we must find my father’s body.”

    There was silence for a moment, save for the wind in the vas and the quiet hum of the rigging.

    Touchstone wiped his hand across his eyes and looked at Mogget.

    “There is ohing I would like to ask. Who put my spirit ih, and made my body the figurehead?”

    “I never knew what happeo 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 whe 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 . . .”

    “No, Mogget!” exclaimed Sabriel. “I want to know, I o know, who you are. What’s your e with the Great . . .”

    Her voice locked up ihroat and a star-  tled gargle was the only thing that came out.

    “Too late,” said Mogget. He started ing his fur, pink tongue darting out, bright cainst white fur.

    Sabriel sighed, and looked out at the turquoise sea, then up at the sun, yellow dis 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 burstihe surface.

    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 rid lively. Far, far removed from Touchstone’s grim past, the threat ir/Kerrigor and the chilling greyness of Death.

    “We shall have to be very careful,” Sabriel said at last, “and hope that . . . what was it you said to the Elder of owe, Touchstone?”

    He knew immediately what she meant.

    “Hope that the Charter preserves us all.”

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