Abhorsen (5 page)

“Can you open it?” asked Lirael. She knew scores of spells for opening doors and gates, and had practical experience of opening ways into many places she wasn’t supposed to have entered in the Great Library of the Clayr. But she instinctively knew none of them would work here.

“I think so,” Sam replied hesitantly. “It’s an unusual spell, and there are a lot of marks I don’t know. As far as I can work out, there are two ways it can be opened. One I don’t understand at all. But the other . . .”

His voice trailed off as he touched the chain again and Charter Marks left the bronze to drift across his skin and then flow into the wood.

“I think we’re supposed to breathe on the chains . . . or kiss them . . . only it has to be the right person. The spell says ‘my children’s breath.’ But I can’t work out whose children or what that means. Any Abhorsen’s children, I guess.”

“Try it,” suggested Lirael. “A breath first, just in case.”

Sam looked doubtful but bent his head, took a deep breath, and blew on the chain.

The bronze fogged from the breath and lost its shine. Charter marks glittered and moved. Lirael held her breath. Sam stood up and edged away, while the Disreputable Dog came closer and sniffed.

Suddenly the chain groaned aloud, and everyone jumped back. Then a new link came out of the seemingly solid stone, followed by another and another, the chain rattling as it coiled to the ground. In a few seconds there was an extra six or seven feet of chain piled up, enough to allow that corner of the well cover to be lifted free.

“Good,” said the Disreputable Dog. “You do the next one, Mistress.”

Lirael bent over the next chain and breathed lightly upon it. Nothing happened for a moment, and she felt a stab of uncertainty. Her identity as an Abhorsen was so new, and so precarious, that it could be easily doubted.

Then the chain frosted, the marks shone, and the links came pouring out of the stone with the sharp rattle of metal. The sound was echoed almost immediately from the other side, as Sam breathed on the third chain.

Lirael breathed on the last chain, touching it for a moment as she took in a breath. She felt the marks shiver under her fingers, the lively reaction of a Charter-spell that knew its time had come. Like a person tensing muscles in that frozen instant before the beginning of a race.

With the loosening of the chains, Lirael and Sam were able to lift one end of the cover and slide it away. It was very heavy, so they didn’t drag it completely off, just making an opening large enough for them to climb down with their packs on.

Lirael had expected a wet, dank smell to come up from the open well, even though the Dog had said it wasn’t full of water. There was a smell, strong enough to overcome the scent of the roses, but it wasn’t of old standing water. It was a pleasant herbal odor that Lirael couldn’t identify.

“What can I smell?” she asked the Dog, whose nose had often picked up scents and odors that Lirael could neither smell, spell, or imagine.

“Very little,” replied the Dog. “Unless you’ve improved recently.”

“No,” said Lirael patiently. “There’s a particular smell coming out of the well. A plant, or an herb. But I can’t place it.”

Sam sniffed the air and his forehead furrowed in thought.

“It’s something used in cooking,” he said. “Not that I’m much of a cook. But I’ve smelled this in the Palace kitchens, when they were roasting lamb, I think.”

“It’s rosemary,” said the Dog shortly. “And there is amaranth, too, though you probably cannot smell it.”

“Fidelity in love,” said a small voice from Sam’s backpack. “With the flower that never fades. And you still say she is not there?”

The Dog didn’t answer Mogget but stuck her snout down the well. She sniffed around for at least a minute, pushing her snout farther and farther down the well. When she pulled back, she sneezed twice and shook her head.

“Old smells, old spells,” she said. “The scent is already fading.”

Lirael sniffed experimentally, but the Dog was right. She could smell only the roses now.

“There is a ladder,” said Sam, who was also looking into the well, a Charter-conjured light bobbing above his head. “Bronze, like the chains. I wonder why. I can’t see the bottom, though—or any water.”

“I’ll go first,” said Lirael. Sam seemed about to protest but stepped away. Lirael didn’t know whether this was because he was afraid or because he was acquiescing—to the familial authority of Lirael as his newfound aunt or because she was now the Abhorsen-in-Waiting.

She looked into the well. The bronze ladder gleamed near the top, disappearing down into darkness. Lirael had climbed up, down, and through many dark and dangerous tunnels and passages in the Great Library of the Clayr. But that had been in more innocent times, even though she had experienced her share of danger. Now she felt a sense of great and evil powers at work in the world, of a terrible fate already in motion. The Dead surrounding the House were only a small and visible part of that. She remembered the vision the Clayr had shown her, of the pit near the Red Lake, and the terrible stench of Free Magic from whatever was being unearthed there.

Climbing down this dark hole was only the beginning, Lirael thought. Her first step onto the bronze ladder would be the first real step of her new identity, the first step of an Abhorsen.

She took one last look at the sun, ignoring the climbing walls of fog to either side. Then she knelt down and gingerly lowered herself into the well, her feet finding secure footholds on the ladder.

After her came the Disreputable Dog, her paws elongating to form stubby fingers that gripped the ladder better than any human fingers could. Her tail brushed in Lirael’s face every few rungs, sweeping across with greater enthusiasm than Lirael could have mustered if she’d had a tail of her own.

Sam came last, his Charter light still hovering above his head, Mogget securely fastened in his backpack.

As Sam’s hobnailed boots clanged on the rungs, there was an answering clatter above as the chains suddenly contracted. He barely had time to bring in his hands before the cover was dragged across and slammed into place with a rattle and a deafening crash.

“Well, we won’t be going back that way,” said Sam, with forced cheerfulness.

“If at all,” whispered Mogget, his voice so low that it was possible no one heard him. But Sam hesitated for a moment, and the Dog let out a low growl, while Lirael continued to climb down, cherishing that last memory of the sun as they descended farther into the dark recesses of the earth.

Chapter Three

Amaranth, Rosemary, and Tears

THE LADDER WENT
down and down and down. At first Lirael counted the rungs, but when she got to 996, she gave up. Still they climbed down. Lirael had conjured a Charter light herself. It hovered about her feet, to complement the one Sam had dancing above his head. In the light of these two glowing balls, with the shadows of the rungs flickering on the wall of the well, Lirael found it easy to imagine that they were somehow stuck on the ladder, repeating the same section time after time.

A treadmill that they could never leave. This fancy grew on her, and she started to think it real, when suddenly her foot met stone instead of bronze, and her Charter light rebounded as high as her knee.

They had reached the bottom of the well. Lirael pronounced a Charter mark, and her light flew up to join the spoken word, circling her head. In its light she saw that they had come to a rectangular chamber, roughly hewn from the rich red rock. A passage led off from the chamber into darkness. There was an iron bucket next to the passage, filled with what looked like torches, simple lengths of wood topped with oil-soaked rags.

Lirael walked forward as the Disreputable Dog jumped down behind her, closely followed by Sam.

“I suppose this is the way,” Lirael whispered, indicating the passage. Somehow she felt that it was safer not to raise her voice.

The Dog sniffed at the air and nodded.

“I wonder if I should take—” Lirael said, reaching out for one of the torches. But even before her hand could close on it, the torch puffed into dust. Lirael flinched, almost falling over the Dog, who stepped back into Sam.

“Watch it!” Sam called out. His voice echoed in the well shaft and reverberated past Lirael down the corridor.

Lirael reached out again, more gingerly, but the other torches also simply fell into dust. When she touched the bucket, it collapsed in on itself, becoming a pile of rusted shards.

“Time never truly falters,” said the Dog enigmatically.

“I guess we have to go on,” said Lirael, but she was really only speaking to herself. They didn’t need the torches, but she would have felt better with one.

“The faster the better,” said the Dog. She was sniffing the air again. “We do not want to tarry anywhere under here.”

Lirael nodded. She took one step forward, then hesitated and drew her sword. Charter marks burned brightly on the blade as it came free of the scabbard, and the name of the sword rippled down the steel, briefly changing into the inscription Lirael had seen before. Or was it different? She couldn’t remember, and the words rippled away too quickly for her to be sure.

“The Clayr Saw a sword and so I was. Remember the Wallmakers. Remember Me.”

Whatever it said, the extra light reassured Lirael, or perhaps it was just the feel of Nehima in her hand.

She heard Sam draw his sword behind her. He waited for a few seconds as she started on again. Obviously he did not want to trip and impale the Dog or Lirael from behind, a precaution Lirael thoroughly approved.

For the first hundred paces or so, the passageway was of worked stone. Then that suddenly ended and they came to a tunnel that was not the work of any tool. The red rock gave way to a pallid greenish-white stone that reflected the Charter lights, making Lirael hood her eyes. The tunnel seemed to have been eroded rather than worked, and there were the patterns of many swirls and eddies upon the ceiling, floor, and walls. Yet even these seemed strange, contrary to what they ought to be, though Lirael didn’t know why. She just felt their strangeness.

“No water ever cut this way,” said Sam. He was whispering, too, now. “Unless it flowed back and forth at the same time on different levels. And I have never seen this kind of stone.”

“We must hurry,” said the Dog. There was something in her voice that made Lirael move more quickly. An anxiety she had not heard before. Perhaps it was even fear.

They began to walk more swiftly, as fast as they could without risk of tripping over or falling into some unsuspected hole. The strange, glowing tunnel continued on for what felt like several miles, then opened into a cavern, again carved by unknown means out of the same reflective stone. There were three tunnels off this, and Lirael and Sam stopped while the Dog sniffed carefully at each entrance.

There was a pile of what Lirael thought was stone in one corner of the cavern, but when she looked at it more closely, she realized it was actually a mound of old, powdery bones mixed with pieces of metal. Touching the mound with the corner of her boot, she separated out several shards of tarnished silver and the fragment of a human jaw, still showing one unbroken tooth.

“Don’t touch it,” Sam warned in a hasty whisper, as Lirael bent to inspect the metal fragments.

Lirael stopped, her hand still outstretched.

“Why not?”

“I don’t know,” replied Sam, an unconscious shiver rippling across his neck. “But that’s bell metal, I think. Best to leave it alone.”

“Yes,” agreed Lirael. She stood up and couldn’t help shivering herself. Human bones and bell metal. They had found Kalliel. What was this place? And why was the Dog taking so long to decide which way to go?

When she voiced the question, the Disreputable Dog stopped her sniffing and pointed her right paw to the center tunnel.

“This one,” she said, but Lirael noted a certain lack of enthusiasm in the Dog. The hound had not spoken with total confidence, and even her pointing had wavered. If she had been in a pointing competition, she would have lost points.

The tunnel was significantly wider than the previous one, and the ceiling higher. It also felt different to Lirael, and not because there was more room to move. At first she couldn’t place what it was; then she realized the air around her was growing colder. And she had a strange sensation around her feet and ankles, almost as if there were something rushing around her heels. A current that swished one way and then the other, but there was no water there.

Or was there? When she looked directly in front or down, Lirael saw stone. But when she looked out of the corners of her eyes, she could see dark water flowing. Coming from behind them, pushing past, and then curling back, like a wave falling upon the shore. A wave that was trying to knock them down and sweep them back the way they’d come.

In a very unsettling way, it reminded her of the river of Death. But she did not feel they were in Death, and apart from the growing cold and the peripheral view of the river, all her senses told her that she was firmly in Life, though in a very strange tunnel, far underground.

Then she smelled rosemary again, with something sweeter, and at that moment the bells in the bandolier across her chest began to vibrate in their pouches. Their clappers stilled by leather tongues, they could not sound, but she could feel them moving and shaking, as if they were trying to break free.

“The bells!” she gasped. “They’re shaking. . . . I don’t know what . . .”

“The pipes!” cried Sam, and Lirael heard a brief cacophany as the panpipes sounded with the voices of all seven bells, before they were suddenly cut off.

“No!” shouted a voice that was not instantly recognizable as Mogget’s. “No!”

“Run!” roared the Dog.

Amidst the shouts and yells and roaring, the Charter light above Lirael’s head suddenly dimmed to little more than a faint glow.

Then it went out.

Lirael stopped. There was some light from the marks on Nehima’s blade, but these were fading too, and the sword was twisting strangely in her hand. Undulating in a way that no thing of steel could ever move, it had become alive, not so much a sword anymore as an eel-like creature, writhing and growing in her grasp. The green stone on the pommel had become a bright, lidless eye, and the silver wire on the hilt had become a row of shining teeth.