by Garth Nix
The river was already breaking up into the myriad streams and rivulets that would form the swampy Ratterlin delta, and far off, Sabriel could see the dark bulk of the sea. There were many islands in the delta, some as large as football fields covered with trees and shrubs, others no bigger than two armspans of mud. Sabriel picked out one of the medium-sized ones, a flattish diamond with low, yellow grass, a few leagues ahead, and whistled down the wind.
It faded gradually with her whistle and the Paperwing began to descend, occasionally nudged this way or that by Sabriel’s control of the wind, or its own tilt of a wing. Its yellow eyes, and Sabriel’s deep-brown eyes, were fixed on the ground below. Only Mogget, being Mogget, looked behind them and above.
Even so, he didn’t see their pursuers until they came wheeling out of the sun, so his yowling cry gave only a few seconds’ warning, just long enough for Sabriel to turn and see the hundreds of fast-moving shapes diving down upon them. Instinctively, she conjured Charter marks in her mind, mouth pursed, whistling the wind back up, turning them to the north.
“Gore crows!” hissed Mogget, as the flapping shapes checked their dive and wheeled to pursue their suddenly enlivened prey.
“Yes,” shouted Sabriel, though she wasn’t sure why she answered. Her attention was all on the gore crows, trying to gauge whether they’d intercept or not. She could already feel the wind testing the edges of her control, as Mogget had prophesied, and to whip it up further might have unpleasant results. But she could also feel the presence of the gore crows, feel the admixture of Death and Free Magic that gave life to their rotten, skeletal forms.
Gore crows didn’t last very long in sun and wind—these must have been made the previous night. A necromancer had trapped quite ordinary crows, killing them with ritual and ceremony, before infusing the bodies with the broken, fragmented spirit of a single dead man or woman. Now they were truly carrion birds, birds guided by a single, if stupid, intelligence. They flew by force of Free Magic, and killed by force of numbers.
Despite her quickness in calling the wind, the flock was still closing rapidly. They’d dived from high above and kept their speed, the wind stripping feathers and putrid flesh from their spell-woven bones.
For a moment, Sabriel considered turning the Paperwing back into the very center of this great murder of crows, like an avenging angel, armed with sword and bells. But there were simply too many gore crows to fight, particularly from an aircraft speeding along several hundred feet above the ground. One overeager sword thrust would mean a fatal fall—if the gore crows didn’t kill her on the way down.
“I’ll have to summon a greater wind!” she yelled at Mogget, who was now sitting right up on her pack, fur bristling, yowling challenges at the crows. They were very close now, flying in an eerily exact formation—two long lines, like arms outstretched to snatch the fleeing Paperwing from the sky. Very little of their once-black plumage had survived their rushing dive, white bone shining through in the last light of the sun. But their beaks were still glossily black and gleaming sharp, and Sabriel could now see the red glints of the fragmented Dead spirit in the empty sockets of their eyes.
Mogget didn’t reply. Possibly, he hadn’t even heard her above his yowling, and the gore crows’ cawing as they closed the last few yards to attack, a strange, hollow sound, as dead as their flesh.
For a second of panic, Sabriel felt her dry lips unable to purse, then she wet them and the whistle came, slow and erratic. The Charter marks felt clumsy and difficult in her head, as if she were trying to push a heavy weight on badly made rollers—then, with a last effort, they came easily, flowing into her whistled notes.
Unlike her earlier, gradual summonings, this wind came with the speed of a slamming door, howling up behind them with frightening violence, picking up the Paperwing and shunting it forward like a giant wave lifting up a slender boat. Suddenly, they were going so fast that Sabriel could barely make out the ground below, and the individual islands of the delta merged into one continuous blur of motion.
Eyes closed to protective slits, she craned her head around, the wind striking her face like a vicious slap. The pursuing gore crows were all over the sky now, formation lost, like small black stains against the red and purple sunset. They were flapping uselessly, trying to come back together, but the Paperwing was already a league or more away. There was no chance they could catch up.
Sabriel let out a sigh of relief, but it was a sigh tempered with new anxieties. The wind was carrying them at a fearful pace, and it was starting to veer northwards, which it wasn’t supposed to do. Sabriel could see the first stars twinkling now, and they were definitely turning towards the Buckle.
It was an effort to call up the Charter marks again, and whistle the spell to ease the wind, and turn it back to the east, but Sabriel managed to cast it. But the spell failed to work—the wind grew stronger, and shifted more, till they were careening straight towards the Buckle, directly north.
Sabriel, hunkered down in the cockpit, eyes and nose streaming and face frozen, tried again, using all her willpower to force the Charter marks into the wind. Even to her, her whistle sounded feeble, and the Charter marks once again vanished into what had now become a gale. Sabriel realized she had totally lost control.
In fact, it was almost as if the spell had the opposite effect, for the wind grew wilder, snatching the Paperwing up in a great spiral, like a ball thrown between a ring of giants, each one taller than the last. Sabriel grew dizzy, and even colder, and her breath came fast and shallow, trying to salvage enough air to keep her alive. She tried to calm the winds again, but couldn’t gain the breath to whistle, and the Charter marks slipped from her mind, till all she could do was desperately hang on to the straps in the hammock-seat as the Paperwing tried its best to ride the storm.
Then, without warning, the wind ceased its upward dance. It just dropped, and with it went the Paperwing. Sabriel fell upwards, straps suddenly tight, and Mogget almost clawed through the pack in his efforts to stay connected with the aircraft. Jolted by this new development, Sabriel felt her exhaustion burn away. She tried to whistle the lifting wind, but it too was beyond her power. The Paperwing seemed unable to halt its headlong descent. It fell, nose tilting further and further forward till they were diving almost vertically, like a hammer rushing to the anvil of the ground below.
It was a long way down. Sabriel screamed once, then tried to put some of her fear-found strength into the Paperwing. But the marks flowed into her whistle without effect, save for a golden sparkle that briefly illuminated her white, wind-frozen face. The sun had completely set, and the dark mass of the ground below looked all too much like the grey river of Death—the river their spirits would cross into in a few short minutes, never to return to the warm light of Life.
“Loose my collar,” mewed a voice at Sabriel’s ear, followed by the curious sensation of Mogget digging his claws into her armor as he clambered into her lap. “Loose my collar!”
Sabriel looked at him, at the ground, at the collar. She felt stupid, starved of oxygen, unable to decide. The collar was part of an ancient binding, a terrible guardian of tremendous power. It would only be used to contain an inexpressible evil, or uncontrollable force.
“Trust me!” howled Mogget. “Loose my collar, and remember the ring!”
Sabriel swallowed, closed her eyes, fumbled with the collar and prayed that she was doing the right thing. “Father, forgive me,” she thought, but it was not just to her father that she spoke, but to all the Abhorsens who had come before her—especially the one who had made the collar so long ago.
Surprisingly for such an ancient spell, she felt little more than pins and needles as the collar came free. Then it was open, and suddenly heavy, like a lead rope, or a ball and chain. Sabriel almost dropped it, but it became light again, then insubstantial. When Sabriel opened her eyes, the collar had simply ceased to exist.
Mogget sat still, on her lap, and seemed unchanged—then he seemed to glow with an in
ternal light and expand, till he became frayed at the edges, and the light grew and grew. Within a few seconds, there was no cat-shape left, just a shining blur too bright to look at. It seemed to hesitate for a moment and Sabriel felt its attention flicker between aggression towards her and some inner struggle. It almost formed back into the cat-shape again, then suddenly split into four shafts of brilliant white. One shot forward, one aft, and two seemed to slide into the wings.
Then the whole Paperwing shone with fierce white brilliance, and it abruptly stopped its headlong dive and leveled out. Sabriel was flung violently forward, body checked by straps, but her nose almost hit the silver mirror, neck muscles cording out with an impossible effort to keep her head still.
Despite this sudden improvement, they were still falling. Sabriel, hands now clasped behind her savagely aching neck, saw the ground rushing up to fill the horizon. Treetops suddenly appeared below, the Paperwing imbued with the strange light, just clipping through the upper branches with a sound like hail on a tin roof. Then, they dropped again, skimming scant yards above what looked like a cleared field, but still too fast to land without total destruction.
Mogget, or whatever Mogget had become, braked the Paperwing again, in a series of shuddering halts that added bruises on top of bruises. For the first time, Sabriel felt the incredible relief of knowing that they would survive. One more braking effort and the Paperwing would be safely down, to skid a little in the long, soft grass of the field.
Mogget braked, and Sabriel cheered as the Paperwing gently lay its belly on the grass and slid to what should have been a perfect landing. But the cheer suddenly became a shriek of alarm, as the grass parted to reveal the lip of an enormous dark hole directly in their path.
Too low to rise, and now too slow to glide over a hole at least fifty yards across, the Paperwing reached the edge, flipped over and spiraled towards the bottom of the hole, hundreds of feet below.
Chapter Twelve
SABRIEL REGAINED CONSCIOUSNESS slowly, her brain fumbling for connections to her senses. Hearing came first, but that only caught her own labored breathing, and the creak of her armored coat as she struggled to sit up. For the moment, sight eluded her, and she was panicked, afraid of blindness, till memory came. It was night, and she was at the bottom of a sinkhole—a great, circular shaft bored into the ground, by either nature or artifice. From her brief glimpse of it as they’d fallen, she guessed it was easily fifty yards in diameter and a hundred deep. Daylight would probably illuminate its murky depths, but starlight was insufficient.
Pain came next, hard on the heels of memory. A thousand aches and bruises, but no serious injury. Sabriel wiggled her toes and fingers, flexed muscles in arms, back and legs. They all hurt, but everything seemed to work.
She vaguely recalled the last few seconds before impact—Mogget, or the white force, slowing them just before they hit—but the actual instant of the crash might never have been, for she couldn’t remember it. Shock, she thought to herself, in an abstract way, almost like she was diagnosing someone else.
Her next thought came some time later, and with it the realization that she must have passed out again. With this awakening, she felt a little sharper, her mind catching some slight breeze to carry her out of the mental doldrums. Working by touch, she unstrapped herself and felt behind her for the pack. In her current state, even a simple Charter-spell for light was out of the question, but there were candles there, and matches, or the clockwork igniter.
As the match flared, Sabriel’s heart sank. In the small, flickering globe of yellow light, she saw that only the central cockpit portion of the Paperwing survived—the sad blue and silver corpse of a once marvelous creation. Its wings lay torn and crumpled underneath it, and the entire nose section lay some yards away, shorn off completely. One eye stared up at the circular patch of sky above, but it was no longer fierce and alive. Just yellow paint and laminated paper.
Sabriel stared at the wreckage, regret and sorrow coursing like influenza in her bones, till the match burnt her fingers. She lit another, and then a candle, expanding both her light and field of vision.
More small pieces of the Paperwing were strewn over a large, open, flat area. Groaning with the effort of motivating bruised muscles, Sabriel levered herself out of the cockpit to have a closer look at the ground.
This revealed the flat area to be man-made; flagstones, carefully laid. Grass had long grown between the stones, and lichen upon them, so it was clearly not recent work. Sabriel sat on the cool stones and wondered why anyone would do such work at the bottom of a sinkhole.
Thinking about that seemed to kickstart her befuddled wits and she started to wonder about a few other things. Where, for instance, was the force that had once been Mogget? And what was it? That reminded her to fetch her sword and check the bells.
Her turbanned helmet had rotated around on her head and was almost back-to-front. Slowly, she slid it around, feeling every slight movement all the way down her now very stiff neck.
Balancing her first candle on the paving in a pool of cooling wax, she dragged her pack and weapons out of the wreckage and lit another two candles. She put one down near the first and took the other to light her way, walking around the destroyed Paperwing, searching for any sign of Mogget. At the dismembered prow of the craft, she gently touched the eyes, wishing she could close them.
“I am sorry,” she whispered. “Perhaps I will be able to make a new Paperwing one day. There should be another, to carry on your name.”
“Sentiment, Abhorsen?” said a voice somewhere behind her, a voice that managed to sound like Mogget and not at all like him at the same time. It was louder, harsher, less human, and every word seemed to crackle, like the electric generators she’d used in Wyverley College Science classes.
“Where are you?” asked Sabriel, swiftly turning. The voice had sounded close, but there was nothing visible within the sphere of candlelight. She held her own candle higher, and transferred it to her left hand.
“Here,” snickered the voice, and Sabriel saw lines of white fire run out from under the ruined fuselage, lines that lit the paper laminate as they ran, so that, within a second, the Paperwing was burning fiercely, yellow-red flames dancing under thick white smoke, totally obscuring whatever had emerged from under the stricken craft.
No Death sense twitched, but Sabriel could almost smell the Free Magic; tangy, unnatural, nerve-jangling, tainting the thick odor of natural smoke. Then she saw the white fire-lines again, streaming out, converging, roiling, coming together—and a blazing, blue-white creature stepped out from the funeral pyre of the Paperwing.
Sabriel couldn’t look at it directly, but from the corners of her arm-shielded eyes, she saw something human in shape, taller than her, and thin, almost starved. It had no legs, the torso and head balanced upon a column of twisting, whirling force.
“Free, save for the blood price,” it said, advancing. All trace of Mogget’s voice was lost now, submerged in zapping, crackling menace.
Sabriel had no doubt about the meaning of a blood price and who would pay it. Summoning all her remaining energies, she called three Charter marks to the forefront of her mind, and hurled them towards the thing, shouting their names.
“Anet! Calew! Ferhan!”
The marks became silver blades as they left her hand, mind and voice, flashing through the air swifter than any thrown dagger—and went straight through the shining figure, apparently without effect.
It laughed, a series of rises and falls like a dog screaming in pain, and lazily slid forward. Its languid motion seemed to declare it would have no more trouble disposing of Sabriel than it had in burning the Paperwing.
Sabriel drew her sword and backed away, determined not to panic as she had done when faced by the Mordicant. Her head flicked backwards and forwards, neck pain forgotten, checking the ground behind her and marking her opponent. Her mind raced, considering options. Perhaps one of the bells—but that would mean dropping her candle. Could
she count on the creature’s blazing presence to light her way?
Almost as if it could read her mind, the creature suddenly started to lose its brilliance, sucking darkness into its swirling body like a sponge soaking up ink. Within a few seconds, Sabriel could barely make it out—a fearful silhouette, back-lit by the orange glow of the burning Paperwing.
Desperately, Sabriel tried to remember what she knew of Free Magic elementals and constructs. Her father had rarely mentioned them, and Magistrix Greenwood had only lightly delved into the subject. Sabriel knew the binding spells for two of the lesser kindred of Free Magic beings, but the creature before her was neither Margrue nor Stilken.
“Keep thinking, Abhorsen,” laughed the creature, advancing again. “Such a pity your head doesn’t work too well.”
“You saved it from not working forever,” Sabriel replied warily. It had braked the Paperwing, after all, so perhaps there was some good in it somewhere, some remnant of Mogget, if only it could be brought out.
“Sentiment,” the thing replied, still silently sliding forward. It laughed again and a dark, tendril-like arm suddenly unleashed itself, snapping across the intervening space to strike Sabriel across the face.
“A memory, now purged,” it added, as Sabriel staggered back from a second attack, sword flashing across to parry. Unlike the silver spell darts, the Charter-etched blade did connect with the unnatural flesh of the creature, but had no effect apart from jarring Sabriel’s arm.
Her nose was bleeding too, a warm and salty flow, stinging her wind-chafed lips. She tried to ignore it, tried to use the pain of what was probably a broken nose to get her mind back to full operational speed.
“Memories, yes, many memories,” continued the creature. It was circling around her now, pushing her back the way they’d come, back towards the fading fire of the Paperwing. That would burn out soon, and then there would only be darkness, for Sabriel’s candle was now a lump of blown-out wax, falling forgotten from her hand.