by Garth Nix
ALSO BY GARTH NIX
Sabriel
Lirael
Abhorsen
Shade’s Children
The Ragwitch
THE KEYS TO
THE KINGDOM SERIES:
Mister Monday
Grim Tuesday
Drowned Wednesday
This paperback edition published in 2005
Copyright © Across the Wall: Tales of the Old Kingdom and elsewhere, Garth Nix 2005
‘Nicholas Sayre and the Creature in the Case’: Copyright © 2005, Garth Nix. First published for World Book Day 2005 by HarperCollins Publishers, UK.
‘Under the Lake’: Copyright © 2001, Garth Nix. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (USA), February 2001, USA.
‘Charlie Rabbit’: Copyright © 2005, Garth Nix. First published in Kids’ Night In, collected for War Child, HarperCollins Publishers, UK and Australia.
‘From the Lighthouse’: Copyright © 1996, Garth Nix. Published in Fantastic Worlds, edited by Paul Collins, HarperCollins Publishers, Australia, 1998.
‘The Hill’: Copyright © 2001, Garth Nix. First published in X-Changes: Stories for a New Century, Allen & Unwin, Australia.
‘Lightning Bringer’: Copyright © 2001, Garth Nix. First published in Love & Sex, edited by Michael Cart, Simon & Schuster, USA, and on Salon.com.
‘Down to the Scum Quarter’: Copyright © 1987, Garth Nix. First published in the magazines Myths and Legends (1987) and Breakout! (1988).
‘Heart’s Desire’: Copyright © 2002, Garth Nix. First published in The Road to Camelot,
edited by Sophie Masson, Random House, Australia, and The Magazine
of Fantasy & Science Fiction, January 2004, USA.
‘Hansel’s Eyes’: Copyright © 2000, Garth Nix. First published in A Wolf at the Door, edited
by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, Simon & Schuster, 2000, USA.
‘Hope Chest’: Copyright © 2003, Garth Nix. First published in Firebirds, edited by Sharyn November, Penguin 2003, USA.
‘My New Really Epic Fantasy Series’: Copyright © 1999, Garth Nix.
‘Three Roses’: Copyright © 2000, Garth Nix. First published in Eidolon, Autumn 2000, Australia.
‘Endings’: Copyright © 2004 by Garth Nix. First published in Gothic!
Ten Original Dark Tales, edited by Deborah Noyes, Candlewick Press, USA.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or ten per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.
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National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:
Nix, Garth, 1963- .
Across the wall: stories of the Old Kingdom and beyond.
ISBN 1 74114 701 8.
I. Title.
A823.3
Cover and text design by Ellie Exarchos
Cover illustration by Hofstede design
Cover title lettering by Shane Nagle
Set in 10.5/14 pt Sabon MT by Midland Typesetters
Printed in Australia by McPhersons Printing Group
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To Anna, Thomas, and Edward
and
all my family and friends
CONTENTS
Preface
Nicholas Sayre and the Creature in the Case
Under the Lake
Charlie Rabbit
From the Lighthouse
The Hill
Lightning Bringer
Down to the Scum Quarter
Heart’s Desire
Hansel’s Eyes
Hope Chest
My New Really Epic Fantasy Series
Three Roses
Endings
PREFACE
FOUR YEARS AGO, AFTER A CHRISTMAS LUNCH, my younger brother passed around a very small ‘book’ of four stapled-together pages that he said he’d found while helping my mother clean out a storage area under the family home. The book contained four stories written in shaky capital letters, with a couple of half-hearted illustrations done with coloured pencils. On the front, it had ‘Stories’ and ‘Garth Nix’ in the handwriting one would expect from someone aged around six.
The stories included such gems as ‘The Coin Shower,’ which was very short and went something like:
a boy went outside
it started raining coins
he picked them up
I had no memory of this story or the little booklet, and at first I thought it had been fabricated by my brother as a joke, but my parents remembered me writing the stories and engaging in this bit of self-publishing at an early age.
I wrote ‘The Coin Shower’ and the other stories in that collection about thirty-five years ago, and I’ve been writing ever since. Not always fiction, though. In my varied writing career I’ve written all kinds of things, from speeches for CEOs to brochures about brickworks to briefing papers on new Internet technologies.
I first got into print writing articles and scenarios for the role-playing games ‘Dungeons and Dragons’ and ‘Traveler’ when I was sixteen or seventeen. I wrote for magazines like Multiverse and Breakout! in Australia and White Dwarf in the United Kingdom. I tried to crack Dragon magazine in the United States, but never quite managed to sell them anything.
This minor success in getting role-playing game articles or scenarios into print led me to try my hand at getting some of my fiction published. I’d written quite a few stories here and there without success, but when I was nineteen years old, I wrote a whole lot more while I was traveling around the U.K. and Europe, broadening my horizons. I drove all over the place in a beat-up Austin 1600 with a small metal Silver-Reed typewriter in the backseat, a couple of notebooks, and lots of other people’s books. Every day I’d write something in longhand in my notebook, and then that night or perhaps the next morning I’d type up what I’d written. (That established a writing practice that has continued for more than twenty years: I write most of my novels in longhand, typing up each chapter on the computer after I’ve got the first draft done in the latest black-and-red notebook. I now have more than twenty of these notebooks, plus one very outof-place blue-and-white-striped notebook that I turned to during the stationery drought of 1996.)
I don’t write everything in longhand first, though; sometimes I just take to the keyboard. Most of my short fiction begins with handwritten notes, and perhaps a few key sentences put down with my trusty Waterman fountain pen, but then I start typing. The pen comes into its own again later, when I print out the story, make my changes and corrections, and then go back to the computer. This process often occurs when I have only part of the story written. I quite often revise the first third, or some small part, of a story six or seven times before I’ve written the rest of it. Often the revision occurs because I have left the story incomplete for a long time, and I need to revisit the existing part in order to feel my way into the story again.
Both my short and long fiction works usually begin with a thinly sketched scene, character, situation, or some combination of all thr
ee, which just appears in my head. For example, I might suddenly visualize a huge old mill by a broad river, the wheel slowly turning, with the sound of the grinding stones underlaid by the burble of the river. Or I might think of a character, say a middle-aged man who has turned away from the sorcery of his youth because he is afraid of it, but who will be forced to embrace it again. Or a situation might emerge from my subconscious, in which a man, or something that was once a man, is looking down on a group of travelers from a rocky perch, wondering whether he/it should rob them.
All these beginnings might come together into the story of a miller, once a sorcerer, who is transformed into a creature as the result of a magical compact he thought he had evaded. So he must leave his settled life and become a brigand, in the hope of finding, on one of the magicians or priests he robs on the road, the one item of magical apparatus that can return his human shape.
Or they might not come together. I have numerous notes for stories, and many partly begun stories, that have progressed no further. Some of these fragments might be used in my novels, or at least be the seeds of some elements in one. A few ideas will progress and grow and become stories, complete in themselves. The great majority of my jotted-down ideas, images, and scraps of writing will never become anything more than a few lines in a black-and-red notebook.
The stories in this collection are the ones that got past the notes stage, that became a few paragraphs, then a few pages, and somehow charged on downhill to become complete. They represent a kind of core sample taken through more than fifteen years of writing, from the callow author of twenty-five who wrote ‘Down to the Scum Quarter’ to the possibly more polished forty-one-year-old writer of ‘Nicholas Sayre and the Creature in the Case.’
Fortunately, you have been spared some even earlier efforts, including the heavily T. H. White– influenced short story I published in my school magazine at fifteen, and even my very first professional short story sale, which felt like a great triumph for me at nineteen years old but now looks rather out of place with my later works.
I hope you find some stories here that you will enjoy, or wonder about, or that linger uncomfortably in the mind when you wish they didn’t. But if your favorite story is ‘The Coin Shower,’ please do not write and tell me that my writing has been going downhill ever since I was six.
GARTH NIX
December 1, 2004
Sydney, Australia
NICHOLAS SAYRE AND THE CREATURE IN THE CASE
INTRODUCTION TO NICHOLAS SAYRE AND THE CREATURE IN THE CASE
I HAVE EXPLORED ANCELSTIERRE AND the Old Kingdom a little in my novels Sabriel, Lirael, and Abhorsen, and in the process I have found out (that’s often what it feels like, even though I’m the one making it up) quite a lot about these lands, the people and creatures that inhabit them, and their stories.
But there is much, much more that I don’t know about, and will never know about unless I need it for a story. Unlike many fantasy writers, I don’t spend a lot of time working out and recording tons of background detail about the worlds that I make up. What I do is write the story, pausing every now and then to puzzle out the details or information that I need to know to make the story work. Some of that background material will end up in the story, though it might be veiled, mysterious, or tangential. Much more will sit in my head or roughly jotted down in my notebooks, until I need it next time or until I connect it with something else.
Every time I re-enter the world of the Old Kingdom and Ancelstierre, I find myself stitching together leftover bits and pieces that I already knew about, as well as inventing some more that seem to go with what is already there.
‘Nicholas Sayre and the Creature in the Case’ was particularly interesting for me to write, because in it I connect various bits and pieces of information about Ancelstierre, rather than the Old Kingdom. As always, the story is the most important thing to me, but this novella also gives a glimpse of the people, customs, government, technology, and landscape of Ancelstierre.
Like nearly everything I write, this is a fantasy adventure story, this time with a dash of country-house mystery, a twist of 1920s-style espionage, and a humorous little umbrella on the side that may be safely ignored by those who don’t like it (or don’t get it). Some readers may detect the influence of some of the authors outside the fantasy genre (as it is usually defined today) whom I admire, including Dorothy Sayers and P. G. Wodehouse.
Planned to be a longish short story, ‘Nicholas Sayre and the Creature in the Case’ grew and grew till it became a novella and ended up taking many more months to write than I had anticipated. It started with these notes:
Nicholas and Uncle to country house
Full of debs and stupid young men
Thing in the Case, eyes follow Nick
Autumn haymaking
thing gets some of Nick’s blood?
refuge in river, thing closes sluice
hay fires in a circle
it is powerful, but poisoned
how far are we from the Wall?
That was the kernel, from which a novella grew over about ten months. I don’t know why I wrote it rather than something else. It wasn’t sold to a publisher, I didn’t have a deadline for it, and I had plenty of other things to do. But only a week or so after writing those notes, I sat down and wrote the first three or four pages in one sitting. I kept coming back to it thereafter, caught up (as I often am as both writer and reader) simply by the desire to see what happened next.
NICHOLAS SAYRE AND THE CREATURE IN THE CASE
‘ I AM GOING BACK TO THE OLD KINGDOM, Uncle,’ said Nicholas Sayre, ‘whatever Father may have told you. So there is no point in your trying to fix me up with a suitable Sayre job or a suitable Sayre marriage. I am coming with you to what will undoubtedly be a horrendous house party only because it will get me a few hundred miles closer to the Wall.’
Nicholas’s uncle Edward, more generally known as The Most Honorable Edward Sayre, Chief Minister of Ancelstierre, shut the red-bound letter book he was reading with more emphasis than he intended, as their heavily armored car lurched over a hump in the road. The sudden clap of the book made the bodyguard in front look around, but the driver kept his eyes on the narrow country lane.
‘Have I said anything about a job or a marriage?’ Edward enquired, gazing down his long, patrician nose at his nineteen-year-old nephew. ‘Besides, you won’t even get within a mile of the Perimeter without a pass signed by me, let alone across the Wall.’
‘I could get a pass from Lewis,’ said Nicholas moodily, referring to the newly anointed Hereditary Arbiter. The previous Arbiter, Lewis’s grandfather, had died of a heart attack during Corolini’s attempted coup d’état half a year before.
‘No, you couldn’t, and you know it,’ said Edward. ‘Lewis has more sense than to involve himself in any aspect of government other than the ceremonial.’
‘Then I’ll have to cross over without a pass,’ declared Nicholas angrily, not even trying to hide the frustration that had built up in him over the past six months, during which he’d been forced to stay in Ancelstierre. Most of that time had been spent wishing he’d left with Lirael and Sam in the immediate aftermath of the Destroyer’s defeat, instead of deciding to recuperate in Ancelstierre. It had been weakness and fear that had driven his decision, combined with a desire to put the terrible past behind him. But he now knew that was impossible. He could not ignore the legacy of his involvement with Hedge and the Destroyer, nor his return to Life at the hands—or paws—of the Disreputable Dog. He had become someone else, and he could only find out who that was in the Old Kingdom.
‘You would almost certainly be shot if you tried to cross illegally,’ said Edward. ‘A fate you would richly deserve. Particularly since you are not giving me the opportunity to help you. I do not know why you or anyone else would want to go to the Old Kingdom—my year on the Perimeter as General Hort’s ADC certainly taught me the place is best avoided. Nor do I wish to annoy your father and hurt yo
ur mother, but there are certain circumstances in which I might grant you permission to cross the Perimeter.’
‘What! Really?’
‘Yes, really. Have I ever taken you or any other of my nephews or nieces to a house party before?’ ‘Not that I know—’ ‘Do I usually make a habit of attending parties given by someone like Alastor Dorrance in the middle of nowhere?’
‘I suppose not . . .’
‘Then you might exercise your intelligence to wonder why you are here with me now.’
‘Gatehouse ahead, sir,’ interrupted the bodyguard as the car rounded a sweeping corner and slowed down. ‘Recognition signal is correct.’
Edward and Nicholas leaned forward to look through the open partition and the windscreen beyond. A few hundred yards in front, a squat stone gatehouse lurked just off the road, with its two wooden gates swung back. Two slate-gray Heddon-Hare roadsters were parked, one on either side of the gate, with several mackintosh-clad, weapon-toting men standing around them. One of the men waved a yellow flag in a series of complicated movements that Edward clearly understood and Nicholas presumed meant all was well.
‘Proceed!’ snapped the Chief Minister. Their car slowed more, the driver shifting down through the gears with practiced double-declutching. The mackintosh-clad men saluted as the car swung off the road and through the gate, dropping their salute as the rest of the motorcade followed. Six motorcycle policemen were immediately behind, then another two cars identical to the one that carried Nicholas and his uncle, then another half-dozen police motorcyclists, and finally four trucks that were carrying a company of fully armed soldiery. Corolini’s attempted putsch had failed, and there had surprisingly been no further trouble from the Our Country Party since, but the government continued to be nervous about the safety of the nation’s Chief Minister.
‘So, what is going on?’ asked Nicholas. ‘Why are you here? And why am I here? Is there something you want me to do?’
‘At last, a glimmer of thought. Have you ever wondered what Alastor Dorrance actually does, other than come to Corvere three or four times a year and exercise his eccentricities in public?’