The officer closed the passport, tucked it in his belt and tilted his helmet back with two fingers, revealing a Charter mark still glowing with some residual charm of warding. Cautiously, Sabriel lifted her hand, and then, as he didn’t dissuade her, reached out with two fingers to touch the mark. As she did so, he reached forward and touched her own—Sabriel felt the familiar swirl of energy, and the feeling of falling into some endless galaxy of stars. But the stars here were Charter symbols, linked in some great dance that had no beginning or end, but contained and described the world in its movement. Sabriel knew only a small fraction of the symbols, but she knew what they danced, and she felt the purity of the Charter wash over her.
“An unsullied Charter mark,” the officer pronounced loudly, as their fingers fell back to their sides. “She is no creature or sending.”
The soldiers fell back, sheathing swords and clicking on safety catches. Only the red-faced corporal didn’t move, his eyes still staring at Sabriel, as if he was unsure what he was looking at.
“Show’s over, Corporal,” said the officer, his voice and eyes now harsh. “Get back to the pay office. You’ll see stranger happenings than this in your time here—stay clear of them and you might stay alive!
“So,” he said, taking the documents from his belt and handing them back to Sabriel. “You are the daughter of Abhorsen. I am Colonel Horyse, the commander of a small part of the garrison here—a unit the Army likes to call the Northern Perimeter Reconaissance Unit and everyone else calls the Crossing Point Scouts—a somewhat motley collection of Ancelstierrans who’ve managed to gain a Charter mark and some small knowledge of magic.”
“Pleased to meet you, sir,” popped out of Sabriel’s school-trained mouth, before she could stifle it. A schoolgirl’s answer, she knew, and felt a blush rise in her pale cheeks.
“Likewise,” said the Colonel, bending down. “May I take your skis?”
“If you would be so kind,” said Sabriel, falling back on formality.
The Colonel picked them up with ease, carefully retied the stocks to the skis, refastened the bindings that had come undone and tucked the lot under one muscular arm.
“I take it you intend to cross into the Old Kingdom?” asked Horyse, as he found the balancing point of his load and pointed at the scarlet sign on the far side of the parade ground. “We’ll have to check in with Perimeter HQ—there are a few formalities, but it shouldn’t take long. Is someone . . . Abhorsen, coming to meet you?”
His voice faltered a little as he mentioned Abhorsen, a strange stutter in so confident a man. Sabriel glanced at him and saw that his eyes flickered from the sword at her waist to the bell-bandolier she wore across her chest. Obviously he recognized Abhorsen’s sword and also the significance of the bells. Very few people ever met a necromancer, but anyone who did remembered the bells.
“Did . . . do you know my father?” she asked. “He used to visit me, twice a year. I guess he would have come through here.”
“Yes, I saw him then,” replied Horyse, as they started walking around the edge of the parade ground. “But I first met him more than twenty years ago, when I was posted here as a subaltern. It was a strange time—a very bad time, for me and everyone on the Perimeter.”
He paused in mid-stride, boots crashing, and his eyes once again looked at the bells, and the whiteness of Sabriel’s skin, stark against the black of her hair, black as the bitumen under the feet.
“You’re a necromancer,” he said bluntly. “So you’ll probably understand. This crossing point has seen too many battles, too many dead. Before those idiots down South took things under central command, the crossing point was moved every ten years, up to the next gate on the Wall. But forty years ago some . . . bureaucrat . . . decreed that there would be no movement. It was a waste of public money. This was, and is to be, the only crossing point. Never mind the fact that, over time, there would be such a concentration of death, mixed with Free Magic leaking over the Wall, that everything would . . .”
“Not stay dead,” interrupted Sabriel quietly.
“Yes. When I arrived, the trouble was just beginning. Corpses wouldn’t stay buried—our people or Old Kingdom creatures. Soldiers killed the day before would turn up on parade. Creatures prevented from crossing would rise up and do more damage than they did when they were alive.”
“What did you do?” asked Sabriel. She knew a great deal about binding and enforcing true death, but not on such a scale. There were no Dead creatures nearby now, for she always instinctively felt the interface between life and death around her, and it was no different here than it had been forty miles away at Wyverley College.
“Our Charter Mages tried to deal with the problem, but there were no specific Charter symbols to . . . make them dead . . . only to destroy their physical shape. Sometimes that was enough and sometimes it wasn’t. We had to rotate troops back to Bain or even further just for them to recover from what HQ liked to think of as bouts of mass hysteria or madness.
“I wasn’t a Charter Mage then, but I was going with patrols into the Old Kingdom, beginning to learn. On one patrol, we met a man sitting by a Charter Stone, on top of a hill that overlooked both the Wall and the Perimeter.
“As he was obviously interested in the Perimeter, the officer in charge of the patrol thought we should question him and kill him if he turned out to bear a corrupted Charter, or was some Free Magic thing in the shape of a man. But we didn’t, of course. It was Abhorsen, and he was coming to us, because he’d heard about the Dead.
“We escorted him in and he met with the General commanding the garrison. I don’t know what they agreed, but I imagine it was for Abhorsen to bind the Dead and, in return, he was to be granted citizenship of Ancelstierre and freedom to cross the Wall. He certainly had the two passports after that. In any case, he spent the next few months carving the wind flutes you can see among the wire . . .”
“Ah!” exclaimed Sabriel. “I wondered what they were. Wind flutes. That explains a lot.”
“I’m glad you understand,” said the Colonel. “I still don’t. For one thing, they make no sound no matter how hard the wind blows through them. They have Charter symbols on them I had never seen before he carved them, and have never seen again anywhere else. But when he started placing them . . . one a night . . . the Dead just gradually disappeared, and no new ones rose.”
They reached the far end of the parade ground, where another scarlet sign stood next to a communication trench, proclaiming: “Perimeter Garrison HQ. Call and Wait for Sentry.”
A telephone handset and a bell-chain proclaimed the usual dichotomy of the Perimeter. Colonel Horyse picked up the handset, wound the handle, listened for a moment, then replaced it. Frowning, he pulled the bell-chain three times in quick succession.
“Anyway,” he continued, as they waited for the sentry. “Whatever it was, it worked. So we are deeply indebted to Abhorsen, and that makes his daughter an honored guest.”
“I may be less honored and more reviled as a messenger of ill omen,” said Sabriel quietly. She hesitated, for it was hard to talk about Abhorsen without tears coming to her eyes, then continued quickly, to get it over and done with. “The reason I am going into the Old Kingdom is to . . . to look for my father. Something has happened to him.”
“I had hoped there was another reason for you to carry his sword,” said Horyse. He moved the skis into the crook of his left arm, freeing his right, to return the salute of the two sentries who were running at the double up the communication trench, hobnails clacking on the wooden slats.
“There is worse, I think,” added Sabriel, taking a deep breath to stop her voice from breaking into sobs. “He is trapped in Death . . . or . . . or he may even be dead. And his bindings will be broken.”
“The wind flutes?” asked Horyse, grounding the end of the skis, his salute dying out halfway to his head. “All the Dead here?”
“The flutes play a song only heard in Death,” replied Sabriel, “continuing a binding laid down by Abhorsen. But the bound are tied to him, and the flutes will have no power if . . . they will have no power if Abhorsen is now among the Dead. They will bind no more.”
Chapter 3
“I am not one to blame a messenger for her tidings,” said Horyse, as he handed a cup of tea over to Sabriel, who was sitting on what looked like the only comfortable chair in the dugout which was the Colonel’s headquarters, “but you bring the worst news I have heard for many years.”
“At least I am a living messenger . . . and a friendly one,” Sabriel said quietly. She hadn’t really thought beyond her own concern for her father. Now, she was beginning to expand her knowledge of him, to understand that he was more than just her father, that he was many different things to different people. Her simple image of him—relaxing in the armchair of her study at Wyverley College, chatting about her schoolwork, Ancelstierre technology, Charter Magic and necromancy—was a limited view, like a painting that only captured one dimension of the man.
“How long do we have until Abhorsen’s bindings are broken?” asked Horyse, breaking into Sabriel’s remembrance of her father. The image she had of her father reaching for a teacup in her study disappeared, banished by real tea slopping over in her enamel mug and burning her fingers.
“Oh! Excuse me. I wasn’t thinking . . . how long till what?”
“The binding of the dead,” the Colonel reiterated, patiently. “How long till the bindings fail, and the dead are free?”
Sabriel thought back to her father’s lessons, and the ancient grimoire she’d spent every holiday slowly memorizing. The Book of the Dead it was called and parts of it still made her shudder. It looked innocuous enough, bound in green leather, with tarnished silver clasps. But if you looked closely, both leather and silver were etched with Charter marks. Marks of binding and blinding, closing and imprisonment. Only a trained necromancer could open that book . . . and only an uncorrupted Charter Mage could close it. Her father had brought it with him on his visits, and always took it away again at the end.
“It depends,” she said slowly, forcing herself to consider the question objectively, without letting emotion interfere. She tried to recall the pages that showed the carving of the wind flutes, the chapters on music and the nature of sound in the binding of the dead. “If Father . . . if Abhorsen is . . . truly dead, the wind flutes will simply fall apart under the light of the next full moon. If he is trapped before the Ninth Gate, the binding will continue until the full moon after he passes beyond, or a particularly strong spirit breaks the weakened bonds.”
“So the moon will tell, in time,” said Horyse. “We have fourteen days till it is full.”
“It is possible I could bind the dead anew,” Sabriel said cautiously. “I mean, I haven’t done it on this sort of scale. But I know how. The only thing is, if Father isn’t . . . isn’t beyond the Ninth Gate, then I need to help him as soon as I can. And before I can do that, I must get to his house and gather a few things . . . check some references.”
“How far is this house beyond the Wall?” asked Horyse, a calculating look on his face.
“I don’t know,” replied Sabriel.
“What?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t been there since I was about four. I think it’s supposed to be a secret. Father had many enemies, not just among the dead. Petty necromancers, Free Magic sorcerers, witches—”
“You don’t seem disturbed by your lack of directions,” interrupted the Colonel dryly. For the first time, a hint of doubt, even fatherly condescension, had crept into his voice, as if Sabriel’s youth undermined the respect due to her as both a Charter Mage and necromancer.
“Father taught me to how to call a guide who will give me directions,” replied Sabriel coolly. “And I know it’s less than four days’ travel away.”
That silenced Horyse, at least for the moment. He nodded and, standing cautiously, so his head didn’t hit the exposed beams of the dugout, he walked over to a steel filing cabinet that was rusting from the dark brown mud that oozed between the pale planks of the revetment. Opening the cabinet with a practiced heave of considerable force, he found a mimeographed map and rolled it out on the table.
“We’ve never been able to get our hands on a genuine Old Kingdom map. Your father had one, but he was the only person who could see anything on it—it just looked like a square of calfskin to me. A small magic, he said, but since he couldn’t teach it, perhaps not so small . . . Anyway, this map is a copy of the latest version of our patrol map, so it only goes out about ten miles from the crossing point. The garrison standing orders strictly forbid us to go further. Patrols tend not to come back beyond that distance. Maybe they desert, or maybe . . .”
His tone of voice suggested that even nastier things happened to the patrols, but Sabriel didn’t question him. A small portion of the Old Kingdom lay spread out on the table and, once again, excitement stirred up within her.
“We generally go out along the Old North Road,” said Horyse, tracing it with one hand, the sword calluses on his fingers rasping across the map, like the soft sandpapering of a master craftsman. “Then the patrols sweep back, either south-east or south-west, till they hit the Wall. Then they follow that back to the gate.”
“What does this symbol mean?” asked Sabriel, pointing to a blacked-in square atop one of the farther hills.
“That’s a Charter Stone,” replied the Colonel. “Or part of one now. It was riven in two, as if struck by lightning, a month or so ago. The patrols have started to call it Cloven Crest, and they avoid it if possible. Its true name is Barhedrin Hill and the stone once carried the Charter for a village of the same name. Before my time, anyway. If the village still exists it must be further north, beyond the reach of our patrols. We’ve never had any reports of inhabitants from it coming south to Cloven Crest. The fact is, we have few reports of people, fullstop. The Garrison Log used to show considerable interaction with Old Kingdom people—farmers, merchants, travelers and so on—but encounters have become rarer over the last hundred years, and very rare in the last twenty. The patrols would be lucky to see even two or three people a year now. Real people that is, not creatures or Free Magic constructs, or the Dead. We see far too many of those.”