No reply. Maybe if I tapped him on the shoulder?
Breathe, the salamander said. Breathe.
I faced the comet. His eyes were open, but blank and dark. I forced myself to stay put. Seen so close, he looked even less human than the Behenian stars.
“Wake,” I said. “You need to wake up!” I took a breath, breathed out, and so did the salamander, in a cloud of cold-morning steam.
Wake! the salamander chimed.
“You need to wake up.”
The comet blinked. His eyes flashed with a brief silver light. I could feel the warmth of the sun on the back of my neck. His long-nailed hand flashed up.
“No!” I cried. “Don’t kill!”
He blinked again, but he lowered his hand. “Who am I?” the comet said, wonderingly.
“You are a comet. You are close to a world—to my world. Wake up!”
I glanced up and saw the moon. It hung in the astral heavens, a glowing silver ball, and not far away the Earth itself was turning, all green and blue and white. I could see the dim lights at their cores, the signs of their aliveness, for this was not the true solar system in the physical world, but the world beyond.
“Listen to me,” I said. “You are a sungrazer. In the real world, not this world of your dream, you will pass this red world above us—there is a faint chance that it will draw you in, but very faint. You will pass the Earth, and if you choose, you can meet your own end there. But it will be the end of that world.”
“I do not wish to kill a world,” the comet said, with a trace of alarm.
“Then wake up! Your dreaming self is dangerous—it brings the cold of deep space with it, and we can’t withstand that. And you might become confused and leave your path. Listen—can’t you hear the sun calling to you?”
He blinked again. His pale skin was flushing with gold.
Wake up, the salamander said encouragingly.
“Wake. And we’ll all live.”
And the comet’s eyes were bright as fire. He raised his hand again, in a gesture, and the salamander and I found ourselves standing in space as the growing tail of the comet whisked by. Then there was the sparkle of stars, Akiyama-Maki was waking up and streaking sunward, between Earth and the moon, and we were slowly falling.
It was with regret as an astronomer that the astral solar system faded around me and the castle of the Behenian stars took its place. The stars themselves were waiting for us, still in their semicircle. Spica seized my arm.
“You are safe. The comet?”
“He’s awake.”
The salamander flicked away. As one, the Behenian stars bowed and faded, returning, I presumed, to their places in the constellations. But Spica remained. She walked back with me, over the causeway, and across the fields. As we drew closer to the house, I could see a bonfire in the orchard, surrounded by moving figures. The bare branches of the trees reached for the moon. The air smelled of woodsmoke and frost. Overhead, in the clear heavens, a silver smudge was visible over Arcturus, blazing over the apple trees. Faintly, I could hear Stella’s familiar voice.
“Look! It’s the comet! Look, mum!”
“And you,” I asked the star, “your sisters? Will we see you again?”
“Oh,” she said. “We are always here.” She pointed upward, and I followed her hand to where the fixed stars span on their never-ending wheel in the shining winter sky.
◆ ◆ ◆
Here we investigate a supernatural mystery in company with a village wizard with a dark past and many secrets of his own to hide, although, as he’s about to discover, none of them even remotely as dangerous and deadly as the enigma he’s trying to unravel…
Garth Nix has been a full-time writer since 2001, but has also worked as a literary agent, marketing consultant, book editor, book publicist, book sales representative, bookseller, and part-time soldier in the Australian Army Reserve.
Garth’s books include the YA fantasy Old Kingdom series, including Sabriel, Lirael; Abhorsen, Clariel, and Goldenhand; SF novels Shade’s Children and A Confusion of Princes; and a Regency romance with magic, Newt’s Emerald. His fantasy novels for children include The Ragwitch; the six books of the Seventh Tower sequence; the Keys to the Kingdom series, and others. He has co-written several books with Sean Williams, including the Troubletwisters series; Spirit Animals: Book Three: Blood Ties, and Have Sword, Will Travel.
More than five million copies of his books have been sold around the world. They have appeared on the bestseller lists of The New York Times, Publishers Weekly, and USA Today, and his work has been translated into forty-two languages. His most recent book is Frogkisser!, now being developed as a film by Twentieth Century Fox/Blue Sky Studios.
Garth lives with his family in Sydney, Australia.
◆ ◆ ◆
GARTH NIX
The low, dry stone walls that delineated the three angled commons belonging to the villages of Gamel, Thrake, and Seyam met at an ancient obelisk known to everyone simply as “the Corner Post.” Feuds between villagers would be settled at the Corner Post, by wrestling and challenges of skill, or the more serious in a formal conclave of elders from all three villages. Twice in the last hundred years the obelisk had been the site of full-scale battles between Gamel and Thrake against Seyam, and then Gamel and Seyam against Thrake.
Every spring, the ploughs would stop well short of the Corner Post, for fear of disturbing the bones of some bygone relative or enemy. In consequence, a small copse of undistinguished trees and shrubs grew around the obelisk, dominated by a single, tall rowan tree, often remarked on, for there were no other rowans for leagues around, and no one living knew how it had come to be planted there.
Small children played under the rowan in the early morning, evading their chores, and lovers met there for trysts in the early evening. No one went near stone and copse by dead of night, because of the bones, and the stories that were told of what might rise there, or perhaps be drawn there, come midnight.
So it was three children under five who discovered a curious change in the stone, just after the sun had risen high enough to glance off the bronze ferrule on the foot of a staff, and there was sufficient light to see that the rest of the dark bog-oak length was impossibly embedded in the stone.
The visible end of the staff was high above the reach of the tallest child, which was just as well, for they were too young to be properly afraid of such a thing. In fact, after attempting to stand on each other’s shoulders in a vain effort to reach it, they forgot all about the staff until the very youngest was bringing water to the sweating harvest-time reapers working toward the narrowest point of the Thrake common. Seeing the Corner Post again, the little girl wondered aloud why there was a big black stick stuck in it, like a skewer through a cooking rabbit.
Her father went to look, and came back even sweatier and more out of breath than he had been from his work. The word spread quickly from field to barn to village, and no more than an hour later, made its way to the cool, green-lit forest home of the nearest approximation to a wizard for fifty leagues or more, since the woman purported to be one in the nearest town of Sandrem had been unmasked as a charlatan several months before.
The forest house had once been a minor royal hunting lodge, in the time of the kings and queens, before the plague and the rise of the Grand Mayors. Octagonal in shape, it was built around the bole of one of the giant redwoods, some twenty feet above the forest floor. A broad stair had led up to it once, but long ago that had fallen or been intentionally destroyed, its remnants now a tumulus of rotten timber, overgrown with ferns and fungus. A ladder, easily drawn up in case of peril, had replaced it.
The current inhabitant of the lodge was hanging pheasants in his cool room, an oak-shingled hut built between the roots of a neighboring giant redwood some sixty paces from the house. He felt the news arriving before he heard those bri
nging it, or at least he sensed there were excited people coming down the forest path. Usually this meant somebody was badly hurt and needed his aid, so he strung up the last three pheasants very swiftly and climbed out, leaving the birds swinging on their hooks. He did pause to close and slide the great bolt across the door, for it was not only mere foxes that fancied hanging game. The Rannachin loved pheasant, and they could open doors that weren’t secured with cold iron.
The pheasant-hanger’s name was Colrean, or at least it was now. He was under thirty years old, but only just, and looked older, because he had spent the last decade mostly at sea, and then more recently in the forest and the fields, under the sky. Sun, salt water, and wind had worked to make his face more interesting. He had a lean, competent look about him, his eyes were dark and quick, and he walked with a noticeable limp, legacy of some unexplained wound or injury.
Colrean had come to the lodge some twenty months before, in midwinter, riding one mule and followed by two others, all of them heavily laden. Tying these up at the old iron hitching post near the ladder, he had by means unknown dispossessed the Rannachin, who had thought to make the lodge a cozy winter lair. Then he had nailed a parchment with a great lead seal to one of the more outstanding roots of the great tree. According to those few folk among the villagers who could read, this was a deed from the Grand Mayor of Pran, granting the new arrival the lodge; hunting rights in the forest and certain other perquisites relating to tolls on the forest road; tithes on fishing or eel-trapping in the river Undrana that passed nearby; a threepenny fee for cattle watering at the wide Undrana ford; and other minor items of tallage.
He had never attempted to enforce any of these imposts, which was fortunate, given that the people of the three villages were by no means convinced that Pran had any authority whatsoever in their purlieu, no matter what the last queen of Pranallis and her vassal the long-gone baron of Gamel, Thrake, and Seyam might have held to be their own.
Colrean had shown his wisdom in matters of friendly relations with the local inhabitants very early, by giving each of the three villages one of his mules within days of his arrival, limping along through snow and ice to do so. Though he carried no staff nor wore a sorcerer’s ring, he was at once suspected of being some kind of magic-worker, for he spoke to the mules and they obeyed, and the village dogs didn’t bark and slather at his approach, but came and bent their heads before him, and wagged their tails and offered their bellies to be scratched. Which he did, indicating kindness as well as magic.
The villagers tried to find out exactly what kind of magic-worker he was, but he would not speak of it. They first knew he definitely was one when Fingal the Miller’s hand was crushed in his own stone, and Colrean came unbidden to cut away the dangling fingers and then, with a cold flame conjured in his own hands, cauterized the wound, so that no blood sickness came. Fingal Seven Fingers was only the first of Colrean’s patients, and he even deigned to help the midwives at difficult birthings, which the villagers knew marked him as no wizard. Wizards were grand beings, and lived in the cities, and were not to be found at village birthings.
The news-bearers who came running to be first to tell Colrean about the staff were Sommie and Heln. They were frequent visitors, inseparable friends, serious-minded, both eleven years old. Sommie was the seventh daughter of the midwife of Gamel and her weaver husband; Heln was the fifth son of the innkeepers of the only inn for leagues, the Silver Gull at the Seyam crossroad. Colrean knew them well, for once a week he taught children (and some grown folk) who wished to learn their letters, taking slates and hornbook to each village meeting hall in turn. Sommie and Heln were among his keenest pupils, following him from village to village and always pestering him for extra classes or books they might borrow.
“There’s a stick stuck in the Corner Post!” shouted Sommie when she was still a good dozen yards away.
“Not just a stick!” cried out Heln breathlessly, skidding to a stop in the leaf mulch of the forest path. “A staff! Like a scythe handle, only it’s dark wood and has a metal bit on the end.”
Colrean stopped in midstep, as always a little clumsily, and lifted his head, sniffing at the breeze. The children watched as he slowly turned about, nose twitching. When he completed his circle, he looked down at the two dirty, excited faces staring up at him.
“A staff in the stone, you say? And you’ve seen it yourselves?”
“Yes, of course! We looked and then came straight here. Why are you sniffing?”
“You’re not playing some trick on me?” asked Colrean. He had sensed nothing on the air, no magic stirring. The Corner Post was less than half a league away, and he felt sure he would have felt something…
“No! It’s there! This morning, from nowhere. The little ones saw it. Why were you sniffing?”
“Oh, just smelling what scents are on the air,” said Colrean absently. “I’d better have a look. Has anyone touched this staff?”
“No! Old Haxon said no one was to go near, and you were to be fetched, I mean asked to come. Ma’s coming to tell you, but we ran ahead.”
Ma was Sommie’s mother, the midwife Wendrel. She had some small magic herself, combined with considerable herb-lore and a little book-learning. Knowing more about such things than the younger folk, she could barely conceal her fear as she puffed up after the children.
“It is a wizard’s staff,” she panted out, after a bare nod of greeting. “And it is deep in the stone.”
“But there is no wizard about?” asked Colrean. He hesitated for a moment, then added, “No new tree nearby, strangely full-grown? A stray horse of odd hue? A stranger in the village?”
“No tree, no stray, no stranger,” said Wendrel. “Just the staff in the stone. Will you come?”
“Yes,” said Colrean.
“Can we come too?” asked Sommie, her question echoed by Heln.
Colrean looked up at the sky, watching the clouds, judging how much daylight remained. He thought about the phase of the moon, which was waning gibbous, and which stars would be in the ascendant that night, influencing the world below. There was nothing of obvious alarm in the heavens, no harbinger of doom.
“It should be safe enough, at least until sunset,” he said slowly. He looked at Wendrel. “But there is danger. As Frossel said:
A wizard without a staff
may still be a wizard
A staff without a wizard
is a void
Waiting to be filled.
“Who’s?” asked Heln.
“Frossel?” finished Sommie.
“Frossel was a wizard, chronicler, and poet,” answered Colrean. He started walking, the slower pace forced by his limp easily matched by Wendrel at his side, the children ranging faster across and behind him on the path, like dogs on a tricky scent who nevertheless do not wish to go far from their master. “I might lend you one of his books. He wrote a lot. Go on, I want to talk to Wendrel.”
The children nodded together and bounded ahead.
“What does ‘a void waiting to be filled’ mean?” asked Wendrel quietly.
“A wizard’s staff, lost or abandoned by a wizard, will attract many things, many of them not of our sunlit, mortal realm,” said Colrean.
“Rannachin?” asked Wendrel.
“Yes, but worse things too,” said Colrean. “Far worse. And the staff—if it is a wizard’s staff—will call magic-workers of all kinds, even from very far away. Though I have some hope the stone will quiet it. I suppose that’s why whoever put it there did so, trying to keep it hidden.”
“The stone will hide it? Our Corner Post?”
Colrean looked aside at her as he strode on with his curious, lumbering gait. A brief look of puzzlement passed over his face like a cloud whisking across the sun.
“You do not know the nature of your stone?”
“I know it’s very old,
” replied Wendrel, with a shrug. “But the powers I have are to do with people, and living things, not ancient lumps of rock or the like. The Corner Post has always seemed simply a stone to me. Though there is that odd rowan that keeps the stone company…sometimes I have felt as if it were watching me, that it is more than a simple tree…”
“It is,” said Colrean. “Though I do not know its nature either. All such mysteries are best left alone, save a pressing need to do otherwise. As for the Corner Post…there is definitely a power within it, though it sleeps, and sleeps deeply. I suspect it is one of the ancient walking stones, which many ages ago came down from the far mountains and took root here to fulfill some compact long forgotten. Those stone warriors served the Old Ones, the folk of the air, so long vanished but never entirely gone.”
Wendrel shivered. When she was a young apprentice, a birthing had gone terribly wrong. At the moment both infant and mother died, she had felt a sudden cold and unnerving presence, something drawn to the two deaths. The midwife who was her mentor quickly said this was one of the Old Ones, and that if they remained still and did not speak, no harm would come to them. Yet to warn Wendrel, the older midwife had spoken. She was at once struck dumb, and it was a twelvemonth before she regained the use of her voice at all, and she who had one of the sweetest voices in the three villages could never again carry a tune.
“Even the most powerful wizards do not readily meddle with such stones,” continued Colrean. “I am surprised…no…I am astonished that the stone would allow anything to pierce it, let alone a wizard’s staff.”
The Book of Magic Page 31