by Garth Nix
Their major drawback was the time they took to prepare and put on. Typically, it would take Lirael five hours or more to prepare a Charter-skin, another hour to fold it properly so that it would last a day or two in a pouch or bag, and then at least half an hour to put on. Sometimes it took longer, particularly the ice-otter skin, because it was so much smaller than Lirael’s normal form. It was like forcing a foot into a sock that was only big enough for a toe, with the sock stretching while the foot shrank. Balancing the process was quite difficult, and it always made Lirael dizzy and a bit nauseated, to feel herself both changing and shrinking.
But on her birthday, since the hole in the rock was less than two feet wide, only the ice-otter shape would do. Lirael began to put it on, as the Disreputable Dog scrabbled at the hole. Somehow the Dog made herself longer and thinner in the process, till she looked like one of the sausage dogs that the Rasseli shepherd-queens carried around their necks, as illustrated in Lirael’s favorite travelogue.
After a few minutes of furious work with her back legs, the Dog disappeared. Lirael sighed, and kept forcing herself into the Charter-skin. The Dog had a well-known problem with waiting, but Lirael felt a bit aggrieved that the hound couldn’t even wait on her birthday, or let her go first.
Not that she really expected it. Her birthday was Lirael’s most hated time of the year, the day she was forced to remember all the bad things in her life.
This year, as on every past birthday, she had woken without the Sight. It was an old hurt now, scarred over and locked deep within her heart. Lirael had learnt not to show the pain it caused her, not even to the Disreputable Dog, who otherwise shared all her thoughts and dreams.
Nor did Lirael contemplate suicide, as she had done on her fourteenth birthday, and briefly on her seventeenth. She had managed to forge a life for herself that, if not ideal, was satisfying in many ways. She still lived in the Hall of Youth, and would till she was twenty-one and assigned her own chambers, but since she spent every waking hour in the Library, she was largely free of Kirrith’s interference. Lirael had also long since stopped going to Awakenings or any other ceremonial functions that would require her to wear the blue tunic, that hated, obvious sign that she was not a proper Clayr.
She wore her Librarian’s uniform instead, even at breakfast, and had taken to tying a white scarf around her head like some of the older Clayr. It hid her black hair, and in her uniform there was no doubting who she was, even amongst the visitors in the Lower Refectory.
The week before her birthday, these working clothes had been greatly enhanced by the transition from a yellow to a red waistcoat, proud symbol of Lirael’s promotion to Second Assistant Librarian. The promotion was very welcome but not without trouble, as the formal letter announcing it came unexpectedly, late one afternoon. In the letter, Vancelle, the Chief Librarian, congratulated Lirael and noted that there would be a brief ceremony the next morning—at which time an additional key spell would be woken in her bracelet and certain spells taught her as was “concomitant to the responsibilities and offices of a Second Assistant Librarian in the Great Library of the Clayr.”
Consequently, Lirael had stayed up all night in her study trying to put the extra key-spells she’d already awoken in her bracelet back to sleep, so as not to reveal her unauthorized wanderings. But the sleeping proved harder than the waking. Hours and hours later, without success, her groans of despair at four in the morning had woken the Dog, who breathed on the bracelet, which returned the extra spells to their dormant state and sent Lirael into a sleep so heavy she almost missed the ceremony anyway.
The red waistcoat was an early birthday present, followed by others on the actual day. Imshi and the other young librarians who worked most closely with Lirael gave her a new pen, a slender rod of silver that was engraved with the faces of owls and had two slender claws where a variety of steel nibs could be screwed in. It came in a velvet-lined box of sweet-smelling sandalwood, with an ancient inkwell of cloudy green glass that had a golden rim etched with runes that no one could read.
Both pen and inkwell were an unspoken commentary on Lirael’s now long-established habit of speaking as little as possible. She wrote notes whenever she could get away with it. In the last few years, she had rarely said more than ten words in a row, and often she would not speak to other humans for days at a time.
Of course, the other Clayr didn’t know that Lirael’s silence was more than made up for in her conversations with the Dog, with whom she would talk for hours. Sometimes, her superiors would ask her why she didn’t like to talk, but Lirael couldn’t answer. All she knew was that talking to the Clayr reminded her of all the things she couldn’t talk about. The Clayr’s conversations would always return to the Sight, the central focus of their lives. By not speaking, Lirael was simply protecting herself from pain, even if she wasn’t conscious of the reason.
At her birthday tea in the Junior Librarians’ Common Room, an informal chamber normally given to lots of talk and laughter, Lirael was able only to say “thank you,” and smile, though it was a smile accompanied by teary eyes. They were very kind, her fellow librarians. But they were still Clayr first and librarians second.
Lirael’s last present was from the Disreputable Dog, who gave her a big kiss. As dog kisses seemed to consist of energetic licks to the face, Lirael was happy to curtail the well-wishing by handing over the leftover cake from her birthday tea.
“That’s all I get, a dog kiss,” muttered Lirael. She was more than halfway into the ice-otter skin, but it would still be ten minutes before she could pursue her friend.
Lirael did not know it, but there were a number of other people who would have liked to give her a birthday kiss. Quite a few of the young men among the guards and merchants who regularly visited the Clayr had looked on her with increasing interest over the years. But she made it clear that she wanted to keep herself to herself. They also noted that she did not speak, not even to the Clayr on kitchen duty. So the young men simply watched her, and the more romantic of them dreamed of the day when she would suddenly come over and invite them upstairs. Other Clayr occasionally did so, but not Lirael. She continued to eat alone, and the dreamers continued to dream.
Lirael herself rarely thought about the fact that at nineteen she had never been kissed. She knew all about sex in theory, from the compulsory lessons in the Hall of Youth and books in the library. But she was too shy to approach any of the visitors, even the ones she saw regularly in the Lower Refectory, and there were very few male Clayr.
She often overheard the other young librarians talking freely of men, sometimes even in detail. But these liaisons were clearly not as important to the Clayr as the Sight and their work in the Observatory, and Lirael judged by their standards. The Sight was the most important, and it came first. Once she had the Sight, she might think of doing as the other Clayr did, and bring a man up to the Upper Refectory for dinner and a walk in the Perfumed Garden, and perhaps then . . . to her bed.
In fact, Lirael couldn’t even imagine that any man would be interested in her, compared to a real Clayr. As in everything else, Lirael thought a real Clayr would always be more interesting and attractive than herself.
Even outside work, Lirael took a different path from the other young Clayr. When they all finished at the Library at four in the afternoon, most would go to the Hall of Youth or their own living quarters, or to one of the Refectories or the areas where Clayr gathered for recreation, like the Perfumed Garden or the Sun Steps.
Lirael always went the other way, down from the Reading Room to her study, to wake up the Disreputable Dog. She’d been given a new study with her promotion, and now had a larger room that had a tiny bathroom off it, complete with water closet, sink, and hot and cold water.
Once the Dog had been woken up and the various items that had been knocked over in their exuberant greeting had been replaced, Lirael and the Dog usually waited till the night-watch assembly, when all the librarians on duty gathered briefly in the Mai
n Reading Room to be given their tasks. Thus safe from observation, Lirael and the Dog would creep down the main spiral, passing into the Old Levels, where the other librarians seldom came.
Over the years, Lirael had come to know the Old Levels and many of their secrets and dangers well. She had even secretly helped out other librarians, without their knowing. At least three of them would have died if Lirael and the Dog hadn’t taken care of several unpleasant creatures that had somehow entered the Library.
“Come on!” said the Dog, sticking her head back out of the hole. Lirael was fully in the otter skin, but there was something strange about her stomach. It looked different, but she couldn’t work out what it was. She turned around to stare at it and rolled across the floor.
“Proud of your new waistcoat, I see,” said the Dog, sniffing.
“What?” asked Lirael. She sat up and bent her head down to look at her furry stomach. It was a different shade of grey than normal, but she didn’t remember making any changes.
“Ice otters don’t usually have red stomachs, Miss Second Assistant Librarian,” said the Dog. “Come on!”
“Oh,” said Lirael. She’d never changed the color of her fur before. Still, it did show at least an unconscious mastery in making a Charter-skin. She smiled, and bounded up behind the Dog. They’d always meant to find out what was down this passage, but something had always interrupted them before. Now they would discover what lay beyond the end of the main spiral.
“The tunnel has fallen in,” said the Disreputable Dog, wagging her tail in a manner that diluted the apparent seriousness of the news.
“I can see that!” snapped Lirael. She was feeling irritable, mainly from having been in her ice-otter Charter-skin for the last two hours. It had started to get very uncomfortable, like extremely sweaty clothes that stick in all the wrong places. There was nothing to distract her from the discomfort, either, because the hole at the end of the main spiral had proved to be quite boring. It had widened out after a while, but otherwise simply zigzagged back and forth without coming to any interesting intersections, chambers, or doors. Now it had ended with a wall of tumbled ice that blocked their way.
“No need to get snarky, Mistress,” replied the Dog. “Besides, there is a way across. The glacier has pushed through, all right, but sometime or other a drill-grub has cut through above. If we climb up we can probably use the bore to get across to the other side.”
“Sorry,” said Lirael, sighing, shrugging her otter shoulders in a movement that flowed right through the rest of her long white-furred body. “What are you waiting for, then?”
“It’s almost dinnertime,” the Dog said primly. “You’ll be missed.”
“You mean you’ll miss whatever I can steal for you,” grumbled Lirael. “No one will miss me. Besides, you don’t need to eat.”
“But I like to,” protested the Dog, pacing backwards and forwards, nimbly avoiding the chunks of ice that had fallen from the spur of the glacier and were now blocking their further progress along the tunnel.
“Just find the way, please,” instructed Lirael. “Use your famous nose.”
“Aye, aye, Captain,” said the Dog with resignation. She started climbing up the tumbled ice, claws leaving deep, melting cuts. “The drill-grub bore is right at the top.”
Lirael bounded up after her, enjoying the almost liquid feel of being an ice otter in movement. Of course, when she stopped wearing the Charter-skin, that memory of liquid movement would make her stumble and jerk for a few minutes, till her mind realized it was connecting with different muscles.
The Disreputable Dog was already scrabbling into the drill-grub’s hole—a perfectly cylindrical bore about three feet in diameter that cut straight through the ice barrier. That was only a medium-sized grub’s bore. The big ones were more than ten feet across. The grubs were rare now, in all sizes. Lirael was probably one of the few inhabitants of the Clayr’s Glacier who had ever seen one.
In fact, she had seen two, many years apart. Both times the Dog had smelt them first, so they had had time to get out of the way. The grubs weren’t dangerous, at least intentionally, but they were slow to react, and their rotating, multiple jaws chewed up anything in their path: ice, rock, or slow-moving human.
The Dog slipped for a moment, but didn’t slide back, as a real dog probably would have. Lirael noticed that her canine friend’s claws had grown to twice their normal length to cope with the ice. Definitely not something a real dog could do, but Lirael had long since come to terms with the fact that she didn’t really know what the Dog was. That she had been born of both Charter and Free Magic there was no doubt, but Lirael didn’t care to dwell on that. Whatever the Dog was, she was Lirael’s one true friend and had proved her loyalty a hundred times and more in the past four and a half years.
Despite her magical origins, the Dog’s smell was all too like a real dog’s, Lirael thought, particularly when she was wet. Like now, when Lirael’s wrinkling otter-nose was pressed up against the Dog’s hind legs and tail as she followed her through the bore. Fortunately, the tunnel wasn’t long, and Lirael forgot the Dog’s odor as she saw that there wasn’t just more boring tunnel on the other side. She could see the glow of a Charter-Magicked ceiling, and some sort of tiled wall.
“It’s old, this room,” announced the Dog, as they slid out of the bore and onto the pale blue and yellow tiles of the chamber floor. Both shook off the ice with a wriggle, Lirael copying the Dog’s expressive shiver from shoulder to tail.
“Yes,” agreed Lirael, suppressing an urge to scratch her-self vigorously around the neck. The Charter-skin was fraying already, and she would need it to go back through the bore and the tunnel. Forcing her clawed forepaws to be still, she tried to concentrate on the room, hampered by her otterish vision, with its different field of view and lack of color.
The room was lit by common Charter marks for light, glowing in the ceiling, though Lirael immediately saw that they were faded, and much older than most such marks would last. A desk of some deep red wood took up one corner, but without a chair. Empty bookcases lined one wall, glass doors shut. Charter marks for repelling dust moved endlessly across them like the sheen of oil on water.
There was a door on the far wall, of that same reddish wood, studded with tiny golden stars, golden towers, and silver keys. The golden stars were the seven-pointed variety that were the emblem of the Clayr, and the golden tower was the blazon of the Kingdom itself. The silver key Lirael did not know, though it was not an uncommon sigil. Many cities and towns used silver keys in their blazons.
She could feel considerable magic in the door. Charter marks of locking and warding ran with the grain of the wood, and there were other marks, too, describing something Lirael couldn’t quite grasp.
She started towards it to see what they were, all her itchiness forgotten, but the Dog put herself in the way, as if curbing an exuberant puppy.
“Don’t!” she yelped. “It has a guard-sending on it, who would only see—and slay—an ice otter. You must approach in normal form and let it sense your blood untainted.”
“Oh,” said Lirael, slumping down, slim head resting on her forepaws, glittering dark eyes focused on the door. “But if I change back, it’ll take me at least half the night to make a new Charter-skin. We’ll miss dinner—and the midnight rounds.”
“Some things,” the Dog said portentously, “are worth missing dinner for.”
“And the rounds?” asked Lirael. “It’ll be the second time this week. Even if it is my birthday, it will be extra kitchen duty for me—”
“I like you having extra kitchen duty,” replied the Dog, licking her lips, and then licking Lirael’s face for good measure.
“Eeerrggh!” exclaimed Lirael. She still hesitated, thinking not only of the extra kitchen duty but also the lecture that would accompany it from Aunt Kirrith.
But just over there, the door of stars and towers and keys beckoned. . . .
Lirael shut her eyes and began to think of
the sequence of Charter marks that would unravel the otter-skin, her mind dipping into the never-ending flow of the Charter, picking out a mark here, a symbol there, weaving them into a spell. In just a few minutes she would be plain Lirael again, with her long, unruly black hair so unlike that of her blond- and brown-haired cousins; her pointy chin so much sharper than their round faces; her pale skin that would never tan, not even in the harsh sunlight reflecting off the glacial ice; and her brown eyes, when all the Clayr had blue or green. . . .
The Disreputable Dog watched her change, the ice-otter skin glowing with crawling Charter marks that spun and wove till they became a tornado of light, shining brighter and brighter and spinning faster and faster till it vanished. A slight young woman stood there, frowning, eyes tightly shut. Before her eyes opened, her hands ran over her body, checking that the red waistcoat was there, with dagger, whistle, and clockwork emergency mouse. In some of Lirael’s early Charter-skins, all her clothes had fallen off in pieces when she’d shucked the skin, every seam unpicked in an instant.
“Good,” said the Disreputable Dog. “Now we can try the door.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Beyond the Doors of Wood and Stone
Lirael took two steps towards the red wood door, then stopped, as Charter Magic flared and swirled before her and a fierce yellow light shone from the door-frame, forcing her to duck her head and blink.
When she looked up, a Charter-sending stood in front of the door—a creature of spell-flesh and magic-bone, conjured for a specific purpose. Not one of the passive Library helpers, but a guard of human shape, though much taller and broader than any living man, clad in silver mail, a closed steel helm hiding whatever face the spell had wrought. Its sword was in its hand, outthrust, held steady as a statue, the point a few inches from Lirael’s bare throat. Unlike their spell-flesh, the weapons or tools of sendings were always made to be completely tangible. Sometimes, as Lirael suspected was the case with this sword, they were even harder, sharper, and more dangerous than they would be if wrought of steel rather than magic.