by Garth Nix
‘I can’t … concentrate,’ whispered Bel. ‘Can you cast … healing marks … on my wound?’
‘I can’t remember the spell,’ said Clariel. She was desperately trying to work out what they should do. Where could Kargrin and the others have gone? What could have happened to them? She didn’t have time to try to cast a Charter spell that she only dimly remembered learning. ‘I’ve forgotten the marks. I’m sorry, I was taught them a long time ago.’
‘I’ll try in a minute,’ said Bel. He was even paler than he normally was, even a little blue around the lips, Clariel thought. He needed help quickly.
‘Kargrin! Roban! Captain Gullaine!’
She heard no shouts in answer, but a moment later a great column of fire erupted on the far side of the Islet, appearing so suddenly that Clariel didn’t know whether it had come down like lightning or had erupted upwards, exploding one of the huts into thousands of burning pieces, some of which started falling around them, though none were big enough to be dangerous.
There was no sound from the fire, though from her experience of forest fires Clariel knew something burning like that would be roaring, popping and crackling loud enough to be heard from a half a league away.
‘Kargrin,’ whispered Bel. ‘Casting a fire spell. Why can’t we hear them?’
‘Because I don’t choose to let you,’ said a soft voice behind them. A woman’s voice, but something about it did not sound entirely human. With the sound, so sudden, came a choking stench of hot metal that was both like and unlike the smell of Jaciel’s forges.
Clariel moved even as she heard the voice, springing up regardless of any chance of being shot by a crossbow, the falchion in her hand. But there was still no one visible. The shark-tooth curtain had not moved. As far as she could tell, there was just her and Bel on that particular hillock of stone.
‘Where are you?’ she said. ‘Face us!’
Bel tried to get up too, but he only managed to raise his head slightly before his eyes rolled back and he slid down. He was either unconscious again or close to it, and the dark, black stain of blood around his shoulder was spreading.
‘I am here,’ said the voice again, seemingly behind Clariel. She spun around, swinging her falchion, but it cleaved empty air. The smell grew stronger, more acrid, biting into Clariel’s mouth. She coughed and spat as if she could somehow rid herself of a taint that was slowly rolling down her throat.
‘Interesting,’ said the voice. ‘So you are … Clariel.’
Clariel spun around again, so fast she was dizzy. The voice was nowhere, everywhere … it was inside her head …
The Charter. Kargrin had told her to reach for the Charter, that simply by joining with it she would gain some protection, even if she couldn’t remember the marks for a particular spell. Just reach for it, fall into it, let it wash over you, Kargrin had said.
With her free hand, Clariel traced a Charter mark in the air. One of the first marks she’d learned, nothing by itself, but a mark that could be used to find a way into the flow. She tried to visualise it deep inside her mind as she drew it, thought of where it could go, the marks that it travelled with, and there they were, glowing inside her mind. She called them to her, and more, and found herself drawing them in the air with her left hand, and the point of her falchion. They weren’t marks that she knew how to join up to make a spell, but they surrounded her and caught her up in the eternal current of the Charter, blocking out that insidious voice, the woman she instinctively did not want to hear –
‘The Charter is a prison,’ said the voice, suddenly breaking through the golden glow and single-mindedness of the marks. ‘A maze to pen you in, to make you go certain ways. You do not need marks and spells, Clariel. There is a power within you. Direct it, by your will alone. I will show you, guide you, be your friend –’
‘No!’ screamed Clariel. ‘Kargrin! Roban!’
She staggered to the edge of the rock, swinging wildly with her falchion, but cut only air. Charter marks hovered around her like bees bewildered by smoke, without direction, and she did not have the skill or knowledge to make the marks into anything, to cast a spell that might reveal her enemy.
‘Lady Clariel!’
A human shout, followed by the rush of footsteps on stone. Roban came charging up the steps, sword in hand, silver fire leaping along the blade. At the same time something else rose up out of the very rock, almost under Clariel’s feet. At night, from a distance, it might be confused for a woman, for it was vaguely feminine in shape. But this close, it could be seen that the slender legs ended not in feet, but narrowed to become sharp, bony blades the colour of yellowed teeth; its arms had two elbows a handsbreadth apart; and its spadelike hands three fingers each ending in a curved-back claw. Its hair was not hair, but a mass of brilliant tendrils of white light that flowed around its head and cascaded down its shoulders and back, and its face, if it had one, was an absence of light in the middle, a dark, oval void without features of any kind.
Below its shining head, its skin was entirely the colour of old, dried blood.
Claws raked at Roban. He parried, Charter marks blazing on his sword, sparks flying. But the creature was far stronger. Roban was forced back and then flung down the steps. Swatted like a fly, he disappeared into the shadow as if he had never been.
As Roban fell, Clariel swung her falchion two-handed at the creature’s back. But the steel did not even break that strange, blood-red skin. It melted as it hit, the metal roiling away in molten drops, as if Clariel had cast a cup of quicksilver against the creature rather than struck it with a finely tempered blade.
The creature turned, and tilted its head quizzically.
‘Not even an ensorcelled sword? But true, you do not need such things. Let me show you how to find the power within yourself. I will guide you, but first let me dispose of this small Abhorsen …’
It strode over to where Bel lay half in the firepit, its blade-feet striking sparks from the stone as it trod. It raised one of those feet above Bel’s head, and was about to bring it down when Clariel screamed and dived forward, grabbing that unearthly, spiked foot with both hands to hold back the killing blow.
The moment she touched it, she felt a shock through her whole body. Her heart raced in panic as some unseen force flowed from the creature into her. It entered her mind, exerting a sudden mental pressure that made her want to let go, to open her hands and let the spike drive down, to help it strike –
‘No!’ shrieked Clariel. ‘No! I won’t let you!’
It took all her willpower to keep her hands closed, and all her strength to stop the spiked foot. Yet despite everything she could do, it kept pressing down, coming closer and closer to Bel’s forehead and the Charter mark there, as if that was the spot where the young man’s skull was thinnest.
‘You are strong,’ said the voice inside Clariel’s head. ‘But not strong enough.’
The thing leaned into its stomp, yet still Clariel managed to keep the spike a bare fingerbreadth above Bel’s forehead. Every muscle in her body was quivering, her head was burning with the effort of resisting the creature’s will. Blood began to trickle from her nose, and she knew the creature was too strong, the spike would smash into Bel’s head and kill him and then it would kill her. She just wasn’t strong enough …
Not by herself.
She needed the fury. Yet all her life Clariel had kept the anger in check, rather than trying to call it up. Now she was far more full of fear than anger and the berserk rage felt impossibly far away.
‘Not strong enough,’ mocked the voice in her head. ‘But good enough to keep as a slave.’
Clariel gripped even tighter, working her hands against the sharp edges of unnatural bone. The spike slipped down, so close that its very tip broke the skin on Bel’s forehead and brought a bead of blood to the surface. Just one drop, like some hideous sweat. But Clariel stopped the spike from spearing through more skin and the bone beneath, even though her palms were sliced open and pain
was shooting through her, and a terrible pressure in her head plucked at nerves, muscles all over her body twitching and rippling as the creature slowly gained control over Clariel’s arms and hands.
The pain helped combat that invader in her mind. Clariel welcomed the hurt, and bit her lip as well, hard as she could, so that the blood filled her mouth. With the salt tang of blood fresh on her tongue, she finally felt the fury. She could sense its source deep inside her, a banked fire that just needed fuel and air to rise up. Clariel welcomed it, summoned it, fed it with pain and fear and the necessity of action. It rose like a tide on the flood in answer.
She screamed again, but this time the scream was not one of fear, but of incandescent rage.
In that moment, she felt the power that had invaded her from the creature suddenly ebb back, and then a moment later, she was inside the creature’s strange mind, and it was trying to resist her, as she gripped it with her will and demanded that it do her bidding. They were locked together, two intelligences in fierce, internal combat, the rest of the world forgotten, all thought and senses concentrated on the battle of wills between them. One must surrender soon –
A thistle-head suddenly appeared, sticking out of the creature’s chest, the other end of the spear-shaft in Kargrin’s powerful hands. Deep inside the creature’s mind Clariel felt as if her own chest had been pierced, but it was a distant, walled-off agony. She held on tighter with both mind and body, now intent not just on stopping the thing from killing Bel, but on making it bow down to her, to obey her in all things, to become her slave … and it was slowly giving in to the pressure of her will, she could feel it weakening … Then it spoke to her, mind to mind, no longer dominant and jeering but pleading with her, begging her for mercy.
‘Help me! They will imprison me, trap me in a bottle, bind me again! You know what it is to be bound, contained against your will! Help me, sister!’
Dimly, Clariel was aware that Kargrin was weaving some sort of mighty Charter Magic spell. She could sense the Charter very close, like a great reservoir of power dammed high above, with Kargrin about to open the floodgates to let that power rush through him and his thistle-head spear, enveloping the creature in bonds it could not escape.
And once bound, Kargrin would force her – for Clariel found herself thinking of the creature not as it but she – into some less solid shape, and then contain her in a glass bottle or some vessel of pure metal, reinforced with spell after spell, all the weight of the Charter to hold the creature inside for forever and a day.
‘Help me, Clariel,’ whispered the creature, the two of them still wrapped together deep in the thing’s mind. ‘My name is Aziminil.’
Clariel let go – let everything go, her mental stranglehold, her grip on the sharp, stabbing feet, her rage – just released everything, even as Kargrin came to the final marks of his spell, an instant before he spoke the master mark. The mark that would bring everything together, combining all the thousands and thousands of marks that shone like a great galaxy of stars in the air above his head and swam the length of the thistle-head spear, striking great gouts of silver sparks wherever they touched the creature’s blood-red flesh.
But Kargrin was just a second too late. As Clariel let go, Aziminil jumped high, wrenching the spear from Kargrin’s hands. The creature stumbled against the wall of the hut but then leaped again, a great leap that took her to the next rocky hillock some thirty paces away. There she tore the spear from her body, threw it towards the sea and vanished into the stone like water soaking into sun-parched soil.
‘Blast it!’ roared Kargrin. ‘Gully! Gully! I got it with the spear but I was too slow with the binding! It’s gone into the stone.’
‘I know!’ came an answering shout from Gullaine. ‘I’m following!’
Clariel looked at her bloodied hands, staring at her slashed palms. She was on her knees, but even that felt too hard to maintain, so she let herself slump sideways, landing heavily next to Bel. Her eyes felt weighted with iron, so weary that she could barely keep them open. She looked out at the sun-drenched world sideways, and saw Kargrin’s boots approach and then his face as he crouched by her side.
‘No,’ she muttered. ‘See to Bel. Badly wounded. I’m all right … just my hands …’
But Clariel knew it wasn’t just her hands and she wasn’t all right. Something had changed inside her during the struggle with Aziminil, and in the moment she had let the creature go free. She had let a monster escape, and not only because she could not bear to think of anything sentient imprisoned in such a way.
Kargrin ignored her, quickly rolling her wrists to look at her wounded hands. Seeing they were deep, but not immediately life-threatening, he did turn to Bel.
Clariel watched dully through half-closed eyes, still lying on her side, as bright Charter marks swirled around Kargrin’s fingers. He called them into the air, where they hung like tiny stars. He arranged the suspended marks into a pattern and sent this shining constellation into Bel’s wounded flesh, the marks sinking through the gethre plates of his hauberk, leaving a golden afterglow behind. Nothing happened for a minute, then the broken quarrel started to move, the barbs of the head becoming visible before the point popped out with a quickly stifled gush of bright red blood.
‘Where … where were you?’ croaked Clariel, as Kargrin turned back to her and carefully lifted her hands.
‘We were caught in a spell ourselves,’ Kargrin said, as he began to cast a healing spell upon Clariel. ‘The hunters trapped. It took me a few minutes to even realise we had been diverted to the other side of the Islet, and then longer to break free of the illusion. We are not dealing with any lesser creature, not a Margrue or Hish. This is one of the more powerful entities, though I do not yet know which one. And there was someone helping it, a mortal, probably under its dominion.’
Clariel cried out as pain shot through her hands, a bitter ache that ran through the bones of her wrist and up her arms and ended explosively in the middle of her forehead with a sharp agony right under the Charter mark on her forehead.
‘Embrace the Charter,’ said Kargrin. ‘It will make it easier. You touched the creature, and some of its taint is on you, resisting the healing marks.’
Clariel gave the slightest nod, because it hurt to move her head too much. She tried to visualise one of the common marks, to use it to find the Charter, but she just couldn’t make it appear in her mind. She needed to sketch the mnemonic used to remember the mark, but Kargrin held her hands, and it was … all … too … difficult …
‘Is she badly wounded?’ asked Roban, who was himself holding his broken right arm, his face pale from hurt.
‘Not physically,’ said Kargrin. There was sweat on his brow as he forced the final mark of the healing spell into the unconscious Clariel’s left hand. It had taken all his skill and power to set the spell in both hands, and neither had worked as completely as they usually did. She still had partly healed cuts across her palms and the lower joints of her fingers, which would need to be bandaged to complete their healing at a natural rate. ‘But she held the creature for some minutes, protected by her blood and her berserk fury. I suspect in anyone else their flesh would have boiled away.’
‘She’s a brave lass,’ said Roban. ‘I hope Kilp and that viper son of his don’t get their hands on her.’
‘Indeed,’ said Kargrin. ‘Her great desire is to leave the city and go back to the Great Forest and I am thinking that is a very good idea, and soon. We need to keep her away from the creature, in any case.’
‘Will it return here?’ asked Roban, looking over the Islet, his good left hand on the hilt of his sword.
Kargrin shook his head.
‘I don’t think so. It has been greatly weakened by the spear, and the spells it laid on the people and place here are broken now. I think it will go into the city … or try to … which means there is still a chance that we’ll get it today … I was so close to the binding! Another few seconds … We have to hope that –’
‘No point moaning over might-have-beens,’ interrupted Gullaine, leaping nimbly up the step. She had a crossbow over her shoulder, a very sandy crossbow that she had just picked out of one of the channels. ‘I lost the creature near the causeway, deep in stone.’
‘But you got the assassin?’ asked Kargrin. ‘Who was it?’
‘No. Only the crossbow,’ said Gullaine, placing it down on the stone. ‘It may tell us something. The shooter swam ashore, made a diagonal to the wall, and then was away along the rocks under the wall. An excellent swimmer, and I would say a young man, but I couldn’t see who it was. How are our younglings?’
‘Bel took a spelled quarrel under the collarbone,’ said Kargrin. ‘A few weeks’ rest, he’ll be fine. Clariel has some deep cuts to the hands, where she held the creature’s bladed feet.’
‘Really?’ asked Gullaine. She walked carefully to the hut as she spoke, and parted the shark-tooth curtain with her sword. ‘She held the creature?’
‘She stopped it from killing Belatiel,’ confirmed Kargrin. ‘Aided by the fury, which shielded her from the thing’s corrosive essence. She is a true berserk, Gully. She’ll need help with that. And quickly, for I want to get her away from the city before a week is out.’
‘Why so fast?’ asked Gullaine, who was now inside the hut, poking about with sword and boot, not touching anything even with her armoured, gloved hands. ‘We might need to hold on to her; as a potential heir she could be useful –’
‘She held the creature,’ said Kargrin. ‘That is something beyond the physical strength of any mortal. It was her will that held it, and that is how Free Magic sorcerers are made. If she should meet the creature again, and dominate it, find how … simple it would be to wield the powers the creature would give her … It is a great risk as long as that creature is free.’
‘She is the Abhorsen’s granddaughter,’ said Roban doubtfully.
‘The Abhorsens bind Free Magic creatures,’ said Kargrin. ‘They do not dominate them and take them into service.’