He stopped mid word and swooped into the stream, one knobby-fingered hand plunging into the water. It emerged a moment later holding a struggling fish, which he immediately bit behind its eyes, severing the spinal cord. His teeth, bright in the starlight, were sharper by far than any human’s.
The dwarf tore at the fish again, blood dribbling down his beard. In a few minutes he’d eaten the whole thing, spitting out the bones with curses and grumbling between bites over the fact that he’d wanted a trout and had got a redjack.
When he finished, he carefully cleaned his face and beard and dried his feet, though he left the bloodstains on the simple robe he wore. But as he walked along the bank of the stream, the stains faded and the cloth was once again clean and white and new.
The robe was fastened around the little man’s waist with a red leather belt, and where the buckle should have been there was a tiny bell. All this time the albino had held it, using only one hand to catch the fish and clean himself. But his caution failed when he stumbled on a slippery patch of grass. The bell sang out as he fell to one knee, a bright sound that paradoxically made the man yawn. For a moment it seemed he might lie down there and then, but with an obvious effort he shook his head and stood up.
“No, no, sister,” he muttered, clutching the bell even more fiercely. “I have work to do, you see. I cannot sleep, not now. There are miles to go, and I must make the most of two legs and two hands while I still have them.”
A night bird called nearby and the man’s head flashed around, instantly spotting it. Still holding the bell, he licked his lips and, taking one slow step after the other, began to stalk it. But the bird was wary, and before the albino could pounce, it flew away, calling plaintively into the night.
“I never get dessert,” complained the man. He turned back to the stream and began to follow it westwards once again, still holding the bell and muttering complaints.
Chapter Six
The Silver Hemispheres
ONE HUNDRED AND twenty miles to the northwest of Abhorsen’s House, the eastern shores of the Red Lake lay in darkness, even though a new day had dawned. For it was not the dark of night but of storm, the sky heavy with black clouds, that stretched for several leagues in all directions. The darkness had already lasted for more than a week. What little sunlight came through the cloud was weak and pale, and the days were lit by a strange twilight that did no favor to any living thing. Only at the epicenter of this immovable cluster of storm clouds was there any other light, and that was sudden, harsh and white, from the constant assault of lightning.
Nicholas Sayre had grown used to the twilight, as he had grown used to many other things, and he no longer thought it strange. But his body still rebelled, even when his mind did not. He coughed and held his handkerchief against his nose and mouth. Hedge’s Night Crew were sterling workers, but they did smell awful, as if the flesh were rotting on their bones. Generally he didn’t like to get too close—in case whatever they had was contagious—but he’d had to this time, to check out what was happening.
“You see, Master,” Hedge explained, “we cannot move the two hemispheres any closer together. There is a force that keeps them apart, no matter what methods we employ. Almost as if they are identical poles of a magnet.”
Nick nodded, absorbing this information. As he’d dreamt, there had been two silver hemispheres hidden deep underground, and his excavation had found them. But his sense of triumph at their discovery was soon dispelled by the logistical problems of getting them out. Each hemisphere was seven feet in diameter, and the strange metal it was made of was much heavier than it should be, weighing even more than gold.
The hemispheres had been buried some twenty feet apart, separated by a strange barrier made of seven different materials, including bone. Now that they were being raised, it was clear that this barrier had helped negate the repulsive force, for the hemispheres simply could not be brought within fifty feet of each other.
Using rollers, ropes, and over two hundred of the Night Crew, one of the hemispheres had been dragged up the spiral ramp and over the lip of the pit. The other lay abandoned a good distance down the ramp. The last time they had tried to drag and push up the lower hemisphere, the repulsive force had been so great it was hurled back down, crushing many of the workers beneath it.
In addition to this strange repulsive force, Nick noted, there were other effects around the hemispheres. They seemed to generate an acrid, hot-metal smell that cut through even the fetid, rotting odor of the Night Crew. The smell made him sick, though it did not seem to affect either Hedge or his peculiar laborers.
Then there was the lightning. Nick flinched as yet another bolt struck down, momentarily blinding him, deafening thunder coming an instant later. The lightning was striking even more frequently than before, and now both hemispheres were exposed, Nick could see a pattern. Each hemisphere was struck eight times in a row, but the ninth bolt would invariably miss, often striking one of the workers.
Not that this seemed to affect them, part of Nick’s mind observed. If they didn’t catch alight or get completely dismembered, they kept on working. But this information didn’t stay in his head, as Nick’s thoughts always came back to his primary goal with an intense focus that banished all extraneous thoughts.
“We will have to move the first hemisphere on,” he said, fighting the shortness of breath that came with the nausea he suffered whenever he went too close to the silver metal. “And we will need an additional barge. The two hemispheres won’t fit on the one we’ve got, not with a fifty-foot separation. I hope the import license I have will allow two shipments. . . . In any case, we have no choice. There must be no delay.”
“As you say, Master,” replied Hedge, but he kept staring at Nick as if he expected something else.
“I meant to ask if you’d found a crew,” Nick said at last, when the silence became uncomfortable. “For the barges.”
“Yes,” replied Hedge. “They gather at the lakeside. Men like me, Master. Those who served in the Army of Ancelstierre, down in the trenches of the Perimeter. At least till the night drew them from their pickets and listening posts and made them cross the Wall.”
“You mean deserters? Are they trustworthy?” Nick asked sharply. The last thing he wanted was to lose a hemisphere through human stupidity, or to introduce some additional complication for when they crossed back into Ancelstierre. That simply could not be allowed to happen.
“Not deserters, sir, oh, no,” replied Hedge, smiling. “Simply missing in action, and too far from home. They are quite trustworthy. I have made certain of that.”
“And the second barge?” Nick asked.
Hedge suddenly looked up, nostrils flaring to sniff the air, and he didn’t answer. Nick looked up too, and a heavy drop of rain splashed upon his mouth. He licked his lips, then quickly spat as a strange, numbing sensation spread down his throat.
“This should not be,” Hedge whispered to himself, as the rain came heavier and a wind sprang up around them. “Summoned rain, coming from the northeast. I had best investigate, Master.”
Nick shrugged, uncertain what Hedge was talking about. The rain made him feel peculiar, recalling him to some other sense of himself. Everything around him had assumed a dreamlike quality, and for the first time he wondered what on earth he was doing.
Then a strange pain struck him in the chest and he doubled over. Hedge caught him and laid him down onto earth that was rapidly turning into mud.
“What is it, Master?” asked Hedge, but his tone was inquisitive rather than sympathetic.
Nick groaned and clutched at his chest, his legs writhing. He tried to speak, but only spittle came from his lips. His eyes flickered wildly from side to side, then rolled back.
Hedge knelt by him, waiting. Rain continued to fall on Nick’s face, but now it sizzled as it hit, steam wafting off his skin. A few moments later, thick white smoke began to coil out of the young man’s nose and mouth, hissing as it met the rain.
“What is it, Master?” repeated Hedge, his voice suddenly nervous.
Nick’s mouth opened, and more smoke puffed out. Then his hand moved, quicker than Hedge could see, fingers clutching at the necromancer’s leg with terrible force. Hedge clenched his teeth, fighting back the pain, and asked again, “Master?”
“Fool!” said the thing that used Nick as its voice. “Now is not the time to seek our enemies. They will find this pit soon enough, but by then we will be gone. You must procure an additional barge at once, and load the hemispheres. And get this body out of the rain, for it is already too fragile, and much remains to be done. Too much for my servants to laze and chatter!”
The last words were said with venom, and Hedge screamed as the fingers on his leg dug in like a steel-toothed mantrap. Then he was released, to fall back into the mud.
“Hurry,” whispered the voice. “Be swift, Hedge. Be swift.”
Hedge bowed where he was, not trusting himself to speak. He wanted to edge out of reach of the grasping, inhuman power of those hands, but he feared to move.
The rain grew heavier, and the white smoke began to sink back into Nick’s nose and mouth. After a few seconds it disappeared completely, and he went totally limp.
Hedge caught his head just before it splashed back into a puddle. Then he lifted him up and carefully arranged him over his shoulders in a fireman’s lift. A normal man’s leg would have been broken by the force exerted through Nick’s hand, but Hedge was no normal man. He lifted Nick easily, merely grimacing at the pain in his leg.
He’d carried Nick halfway back to his tent before the inert body on his shoulders twitched and the young man began to cough.
“Easy, Master,” said Hedge, increasing his pace. “I’ll soon have you out of the rain.”
“What happened?” asked Nick, his voice rasping. His throat felt as if he’d just smoked half a dozen cigars and drunk a bottle of brandy.
“You fainted,” replied Hedge, pushing through the flaps of the tent door. “Are you able to dry yourself and get to bed?”
“Yes, yes, of course,” snapped Nick, but his legs trembled as Hedge put him down, and he had to balance himself against a traveling chest. Overhead, the rain beat out a steady rhythm on the canvas, accentuated every few minutes by the dull bass boom of thunder.
“Good,” replied Hedge, handing him a towel. “I must go and give the Night Crew their instructions; then I have to go and . . . acquire another barge. It would probably be best if you rested here, sir. I will make sure someone—not one of the afflicted—brings your meals and empties the necessaries and so forth.”
“I’m quite able to look after myself,” replied Nick, though he couldn’t stop shivering as he stripped off his shirt and began to weakly towel his chest and arms. “Including overseeing the Night Crew.”
“That will not be required,” said Hedge. He leaned over Nick, and his eyes appeared to grow larger and fill with a flickering red light, as if they were windows to a great furnace somehow burning inside his skull.
“It would be best if you rested here,” he repeated, his breath hot and metallic on Nick’s face. “You do not need to supervise the work.”
“Yes,” agreed Nick dully, the towel frozen in mid motion. “It would be best for me to rest . . . here.”
“You will await my return,” commanded Hedge. His usual subordinate tone was completely gone, and he loomed over Nick like a headmaster about to cane a pupil.
“I will await your return,” Nick repeated.
“Good,” said Hedge. He smiled and turned on his heel, striding back out into the rain. It evaporated instantly into steam as it touched his bare head, wreathing him with a strange white halo. A few steps later, the steam wafted away, and the rain simply plastered down his hair.
Back in his tent, Nick suddenly started drying himself again. That done, he put on a pair of badly repaired pajamas and went to his bed of piled furs. His camp bed from Ancelstierre had broken days before, the springs collapsing into rust and the canvas crumbling with mildew.
Sleep came quickly, but not rest. He dreamed of the two silver hemispheres, and his Lightning Farm that was being set up across the Wall. He saw the hemispheres absorbing power from a thousand lightning strikes and, as they drew power, overcoming the force that kept them apart. He saw them finally hurtle together, charged with the strength of ten thousand storms . . . but then the dream began again from the beginning, so he couldn’t see what happened when the hemispheres met.
Outside, the rain came down in sheets and the lightning struck again and again into and around the pit. Thunder rumbled and shook as the Dead Hands of the Night Crew strained at the ropes, slowly dragging the first silver hemisphere towards the Red Lake and the second hemisphere up and out of the pit.
Chapter Seven
A Last Request
IT WAS STILL raining two days after Lirael and Sam’s all-too-successful weather working. Despite the oilskin coats thoughtfully packed by the sendings back at the House, they were completely, and seemingly permanently, sodden. Fortunately the spell was finally weakening, particularly the wind-summoning aspect, so the rain had lessened and was no longer driving horizontally into their faces, and they weren’t being assaulted by sticks, leaves, and other wind-borne debris.
On the positive side, as Lirael had to remind herself every few hours, the rain had made it absolutely impossible for any Gore Crows to find them. Though that was somehow not as cheering as it should have been.
It also wasn’t cold, which was another positive. They would have frozen to death otherwise, or exhausted themselves into immobility by using Charter Magic to stay alive. Both the wind and the rain were warm, and if there had been even an hour or two without them, Lirael would have thought their weather working a great success. As it was, misery rather tainted any pride in the spell.
They were getting close to the Red Lake now, climbing up through the lush forested foothills of Mount Abed and her sisters. The trees grew close here, forming a canopy overhead, interspersed with many ferns and plants Lirael knew only from books. The leaf litter from all of them was thick on the ground, making a carpet over the mud. Because of the rain, there were thousands of tiny rivulets of water everywhere, cascading among tree roots, down stone, and around Lirael’s ankles. When she could see her ankles, because most of the time her legs were buried up to the shins in a mixture of wet leaves and mud.
It was very hard going, and Lirael was more tired than she had thought possible. The rests, when they had them, consisted of finding the largest tree with the thickest foliage to keep out the rain, and the highest roots to sit on, to keep out of the mud. Lirael had found that she could sleep even in these conditions, though more than once she awoke, after the scant two hours they allowed themselves, to find herself lying in the mud rather than sitting above it.
Of course, once they got back out in the rain, the mud soon washed off. Lirael wasn’t sure which was worse. Mud or rain. Or the middle course: the first ten minutes after moving out of shelter, when the mud was getting washed off and running down her face, hands, and legs.
It was at exactly that time after a rest, with her total attention on getting the mud out of her eyes as they climbed up yet another gully, that they found a dying Royal Guard, propped up against the trunk of a sheltering tree. Or rather, the Disreputable Dog found her, sniffing her out as she scrabbled ahead of Lirael and Sam.
The Guardswoman was unconscious, her red and gold surcoat stained black with blood, her mail hauberk ripped and torn in several places. She still held a notched and blunted sword firmly in her right hand, while her left was frozen in a spell-casting gesture she would never complete.
Both Lirael and Sam knew that she was almost gone, her spirit already stepping across the border into Death. Quickly Sam bent down, calling up the most powerful healing spell he knew. But even as the first Charter mark flowered brightly in his mind, she was dead. The faint sheen of life in her eyes disappeared, replaced by a dull, unseeing
gaze. Sam let the healing mark go and brushed her eyelids gently shut.
“One of Father’s Guards,” he said heavily. “I don’t know her, though. She was probably from the Guard tower at Roble’s Town or Uppside. I wonder what she was doing . . .”
Lirael nodded, but she couldn’t tear her gaze away from the corpse. She felt so useless. She kept on being too late, too slow. The Southerling in the river, after the battle with Chlorr. Barra and the merchants. Now this woman. It was so unfair that she should die alone, with only a few minutes between death and rescue. If only they’d been quicker climbing the hill, or if they hadn’t stopped for that last rest . . .
“She was a few days dying,” said the Disreputable Dog, sniffing around the body. “But she can’t have come far, Mistress. Not with those wounds.”
“We must be close to Hedge and Nick then,” said Sam, straightening up to cast a wary eye around. “It’s so hard to tell under all these trees. We could be near the top of the ridge or still have miles to go.”
“I guess I’d better find out,” said Lirael slowly. She was still looking down at the dead body of the Guard. “What killed her, and where the enemy are.”
“We must hurry then,” said the Dog, jumping up on her hind legs with sudden excitement. “The river will have taken her some distance.”
“You’re going into Death?” asked Sam. “Is that wise? I mean, Hedge could be nearby—or even waiting in Death!”
“I know,” said Lirael. She had been thinking exactly the same thing. “But I think it’s worth the risk. We need to find out exactly where Nick’s diggings are, and what happened to this Guard. We can’t just keep blindly marching on.”
“I suppose so,” said Sam, biting his lip with unconscious anxiety. “What will I do?”
“Watch over my body while I’m gone, please,” said Lirael.