by Garth Nix
PERIMETER COMMAND
NORTHERN ARMY GROUP
Unauthorized egress from the Perimeter Zone is strictly forbidden.
Anyone attempting to cross the Perimeter Zone will be shot without warning.
Authorized travelers must report to the Perimeter Command H.Q.
REMEMBER—NO WARNING WILL BE MADE
Sabriel read the note with interest, and felt a quickening sense of excitement start within her. Her memories of the Old Kingdom were dim, from the perspective of a child, but she felt a sense of mystery and wonder kindle with the force of the Charter Magic she felt around her—a sense of something so much more alive than the bitumened parade ground, and the scarlet warning sign. And much more freedom than Wyverley College.
But that feeling of wonder and excitement came laced with a dread that she couldn’t shake, a dread made up of fear for what might be happening to her father . . . what might have already happened . . .
The arrow on the sign indicating where authorized travelers should go seemed to point in the direction of a bitumen parade ground, lined with white-painted rocks, and a number of unprepossessing wooden buildings. Other than that, there were simply the beginnings of the communication trenches that sank into the ground and then zigzagged their way to the double line of trenches, blockhouses and fortifications that confronted the Wall.
Sabriel studied them for a while, and saw the flash of color as several soldiers hopped out of one trench and went forward to the wire. They seemed to be carrying spears rather than rifles and she wondered why the Perimeter was built for modern war, but manned by people expecting something rather more medieval. Then she remembered a conversation with her father and his comment that the Perimeter had been designed far away in the South, where they refused to admit that this perimeter was different from any other contested border. Up until a century or so ago, there had also been a wall on the Ancelstierre side. A lowish wall, made of rammed earth and peat, but a successful one.
Recalling that conversation, her eyes made out a low rise of scarred earth in the middle of the desolation of wire, and she realized that was where the southern wall had been. Peering at it, she also realized that what she had taken to be loose pickets between lines of concertina wire were something different—tall constructs more like the trunks of small trees stripped of every branch. They seemed familiar to her, but she couldn’t place what they were.
Sabriel was still staring at them, thinking, when a loud and not very pleasant voice erupted a little way behind her right ear.
“What do you think you’re doing, Miss? You can’t loiter about here. On the bus, or up to the Tower!”
Sabriel winced and turned as quickly as she could, skis sliding one way and stocks the other, framing her head in a St. Andrew’s Cross. The voice belonged to a large but fairly young soldier, whose bristling mustaches were more evidence of martial ambition than proof of them. He had two gilded bands on his sleeve, but didn’t wear the mail hauberk and helmet Sabriel had seen on the other soldiers. He smelled of shaving cream and talc, and was so clean, polished and full of himself that Sabriel immediately catalogued him as some sort of natural bureaucrat currently disguised as a soldier.
“I am a citizen of the Old Kingdom,” she replied quietly, staring back into his red flushed face and piggy eyes in the manner which Miss Prionte had taught her girls to instruct lesser domestic servants in Etiquette IV. “I am returning there.”
“Papers!” demanded the soldier, after a moment’s hesitation at the words “Old Kingdom.”
Sabriel gave a frosty smile (also part of Miss Prionte’s curriculum) and made a ritual movement with the tips of her fingers—the symbol of disclosing, of things hidden becoming seen, of unfolding. As her fingers sketched, she formed the symbol in her mind, linking it with the papers she carried in the inner pocket of her leather tunic. Finger-sketched and mind-drawn symbol merged, and the papers were in her hand. An Ancelstierre passport, as well as the much rarer document the Ancelstierre Perimeter Command issued to people who had traffic in both countries: a hand-bound document printed by letterpress on handmade paper, with an artist’s sketch instead of a photograph and prints from thumbs and toes in a purple ink.
The soldier blinked, but said nothing. Perhaps, thought Sabriel, as he took the proffered documents, the man thought it was a parlor trick. Or perhaps he just didn’t notice. Maybe Charter Magic was common here, so close to the Wall.
The man looked through her documents carefully, but without real interest. Sabriel now felt certain that he was no one important from the way he pawed through her special passport. He’d obviously never seen one before. Mischievously, she started to weave the Charter mark for a snatch, or catch, to flick the papers out of his hands and back into her pocket before his piggy eyes worked out what was going on.
But, in the first second of motion, she felt the flare of other Charter Magic to either side and behind her—and heard the clattering of hobnails on the bitumen. Her head snapped back from the papers, and she felt her hair whisk across her forehead as she looked from side to side. Soldiers were pouring out of the huts and out of the trenches, sword-bayonets in their hands and rifles at the shoulder. Several of them wore badges that she realized marked them as Charter Mages. Their fingers were weaving warding symbols, and barriers that would lock Sabriel into her footsteps, tie her to her shadow. Crude magic, but strongly cast.
Instinctively, Sabriel’s mind and hands flashed into the sequence of symbols that would wipe clean these bonds, but her skis shifted and fell into the crook of her elbow, and she winced at the blow.
At the same time, a soldier ran ahead of the others, sunlight glinting on the silver stars on his helmet.
“Stop!” he shouted. “Corporal, step back from her!”
The corporal, deaf to the hum of Charter Magic, blind to the flare of half-wrought signs, looked up from her papers and gaped for a second, fear erasing his features. He dropped the passports, and stumbled back.
In his face, Sabriel suddenly realized what it meant to use magic on the Perimeter, and she held herself absolutely still, blanking out the partly made signs in her mind. Her skis slipped farther down her arm, the bindings catching for a moment before tearing loose and clattering onto the ground. Soldiers rushed forward and, in seconds, formed a ring around her, swords angled towards her throat. She saw streaks of silver, plated onto the blades, and crudely written Charter symbols, and understood. These weapons were made to kill things that were already dead—inferior versions of the sword she wore at her own side.
The man who’d shouted—an officer, Sabriel realized—bent down and picked up her passports. He studied them for a moment, then looked up at Sabriel. His eyes were pale blue and held a mixture of harshness and compassion that Sabriel found familiar, though she couldn’t place it—till she remembered her father’s eyes. Abhorsen’s eyes were so dark brown they seemed black, but they held a similar feeling.
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, Corpora
l,” 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 farther 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 Three
“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.”