Goldenhand (12 page)

“A crossbow bolt, I believe?”

“Yes,” said Ferin.

“And Karrilke tried a healing spell which didn't work?”

“Yes,” said Huire. “The one she always uses.”

“Hmm,” said Astilaran. “Have you any talismans, charms, or suchlike about you? Ferin, that is your name?”

“Yes, I am Ferin. I have no charms. Our shaman gave me three spirit-glass arrows, but those I have used.”

“I will essay another healing spell in a moment,” said Astilaran. “But first I want to take a look at the wound. It does not smell bad, not yet, though there is some reason to fear corruption will occur.”

He unbuttoned several pockets, taking a clean bandage from one, and a small silver bottle from another, and a tube of canvas from his satchel, which he swiftly unrolled to reveal a number of very sharp-looking short knives. Taking one of these, he swiftly and expertly cut off Ferin's makeshift bandage, using the point to pry away pieces that were stuck on with dried blood. The mountain girl forced herself to watch as if this was nothing, though she did almost cry out when Astilaran poured whatever was in the silver bottle over and into the wound. It wasn't water.

The wound began to bleed again. The blood was welling rather than rushing out, but there was enough to alarm Ferin, who instinctively moved to press her hand against the flow.

“No, no, stay as you are, I'll not let you bleed too much,” said Astilaran. “I want to allow the ill humors that have suppurated near the surface to flow away, and I will cast a spell to both cleanse and mend in a moment. Does it hurt a great deal here?”

Ferin nodded very slightly as the healer pressed his finger just below her knee.

“Hmm,” said Astilaran. He looked at her intently. “You wouldn't say if it did, would you? Your people believe in not showing pain?”

“Pain is a challenge to be met and overcome,” said Ferin through clenched teeth, as Astilaran pressed in several other points.

“Fortunately for my purposes, observation of your pupils, skin, and that clenched jaw provides me with sufficient response to my questions,” said Astilaran. “Now, I am going to cast a Charter spell of healing. You have seen this done before?”

“No,” said Ferin. She'd been unconscious when Karrilke had tried to cast the healing spell on the boat.

“You have seen the marks move on the Charter Stone,” said Astilaran. “I will call marks like that and join them to make a spell, which will enter your leg. Do not move, or be alarmed. The spell will take away most of the pain, knit the flesh together, and cleanse the wound.”

“We do not have any such spells,” said Ferin. “Our shamans and witches only have spells to cause harm, destroy things, bend others to their will. That is why they must be kept in check with neck-rings and keepers. Our healers have no magic; they use herbs and make potions and pastes.”

“I do that too,” said Astilaran. “Charter Magic is not without cost, or danger, and if healing can be done in other ways, I do it. Now, as I said, do not move.”

The healer shut his eyes and reached up with his hands, stretching his long and surprisingly elegant fingers wide. Glowing Charter marks began to form around his hands, marks slowly drifting around one another, linking and changing. After a few seconds, he held a chain of glowing marks, which stopped shifting about as they settled into position.

Astilaran lowered his fingers and the glowing chain fell upon Ferin's ankle. As it did so, a savage, overwhelming pain struck her in the stomach. She made a choking sound, her eyes rolled back,
and her head lolled to one side. The chain of marks broke and the individual marks rolled away, sank into the ground, and disappeared.

The spell had failed.

“Hmm,” said Astilaran. He raised his left hand, clenching his fingers into a claw, which he pointed at the Charter Stone, closing his eyes in concentration again. This time, Charter marks came boiling up out of the stone and danced across the air to his clawed hand, surrounded his fingers, and continued along his arm into his body. More and more marks came, making a flowing vine of golden light from stone to man.

Ferin recovered consciousness a few seconds later, the pain in her belly dissipating, and saw this line of light and Astilaran kneeling by her side. She tried to say something, but her mouth was extraordinarily dry, so she could merely growl and cough.

Astilaran spoke a word and a particularly bright Charter mark appeared in the air above her leg and began to slowly turn, as it did so sending out a shower of small, cool sparks of brilliant light. Other marks joined this one, coming out of Astilaran's mouth, and then he suddenly brought his right hand down on Ferin's ankle and the super-bright Charter mark and all the others with it that had come from the stone flowed from his hand into her leg with a flash like sudden, close lightning out of a clear sky.

The pain in Ferin's stomach struck again, more intense than ever, and she fainted from the shock.

When she came to, perhaps a minute later, Astilaran was examining the clan sign above Ferin's navel, his hands hovering above her skin as if he were warming them at a particularly hot fire he dared not approach too closely.

Like all the Athask people's, Ferin's clan sign had been made when she was very young, using the point of a red-hot knife to carve a very simple, stylized design of the mountain cat from which they took their name. The resulting scars were no wider than a knife's
edge, and slightly red, though in most of the older people the red faded until all that was left were lines of white.

“This is the trouble,” said Astilaran. He seemed all of a sudden to be very tired; his eyes were hooded and his hand shook. “There is something under the skin here. A Free Magic charm of some kind, a very strong one. Perhaps even something necromantic . . . there is the hint of Death . . .”

Ferin stared at him blearily. The overwhelming pain in her stomach had certainly been centered in her clan sign. But it was gone now . . . and so was the pain in her ankle. She sat up straighter and looked at her leg. The swelling had receded, the wound no longer bled, and in fact it looked as if it had been healing well for at least half a moon. Small glowing symbols—Charter marks—were still crawling about, but they did not enter her skin.

Ferin flexed her foot experimentally. There was a dull ache there, but it was nothing compared to what it had been. She put her hands down and began to get up.

“Slowly, slowly,” said Astilaran. “I was forced to draw upon the stone and use a master mark to make the spell powerful enough to break through against the Free Magic talisman you have under your skin. The spell will make you feel stronger than you are for some time, but you still need rest.”

“You say there is a magic charm under my skin?” asked Ferin, her voice rasping. She took out her knife and set its point against the clan sign on her stomach. “I will cut it out!”

“No! No, you can't do that!” protested Astilaran, grabbing her wrist. “It can only be removed using magic, Charter Magic. Or by whoever put it there in the first place, I suppose.”

“The Witch With No Face,” muttered Ferin. “It has to be. That is how my pursuers know where I am.”

“Very likely,” said Astilaran. “But you are going to the Clayr, Karrilke tells me. There are many mages among them who have the
skill and the power to remove such a horrid thing.”

Ferin slowly resheathed her knife, her face set in a scowl. With Astilaran helping her, she stood, pausing halfway up to pick up her bow and arrow case. She glanced at her pack, but Astilaran shook his head.

“As I said, you feel stronger than you are. Let someone else carry it, for now. The pain and weakness will return all the sooner if you extend yourself too far. I also do not know how my spell will fare with that charm in your belly; it is possible it will wane all the sooner or take some unusual course. You must be careful.”

Ferin took a step, slowly putting her weight on her injured leg. The ache grew stronger, but her ankle would support her. She could walk, perhaps even run. Most important, she could stand well enough to shoot.

Many people were coming up the road now, scores of them, all carrying packs and bags, some even pushing little carts. They were quieter; there was none of the shouting and screaming that had gone on when the news first came.

Out beyond the breakwater, the raider was nosing into the last part of the channel. Very soon, the ship would tie up at a jetty, the wood-weirds would be freed from the rowing benches, and they would come ashore, with sorcerers and keepers close behind.

Then the hunt would begin.

En Route to the Clayr's Glacier, Following the Ratterlin

O
h!” exclaimed Lirael. She held her hand to her face, hiding a sudden bubbling up of laughter at Nick's stricken face. He seemed more concerned about the prospect of sudden nakedness than he had been by the prospect of bleeding to death. “I should have thought of this . . . things made with machines in Ancelstierre, they fall apart once past the Wall. I have a spare cloak, I'll get that for you.”

“Thank you,” said Nick, clutching his rags about himself. That prompted another memory. The owl and the dog, in his tent near the Red Lake pit . . .

“Um, I seem to recall I've been . . . ah . . . without clothes before . . . I mean, you've seen . . .”

“Yes,” said Lirael, coming over with a cloak in her hands. “You were not yourself, of course, under the sway of Orannis. You were very, very thin.”

“Oh,” said Nick, taking the cloak and quickly wrapping it around himself. What did that mean? Very thin? Did it mean “super-ugly very thin,” or was it just “extremely unhealthy very thin” or did it not mean anything, just an observation, like “that flower is yellow,” of no importance to Lirael, who had more pressing things to think about?

“I'll just go over there,” he said, scuttling off like a large blue beetle, shedding various pieces of torn and disintegrating Ancelstierran cloth from under the cloak.

Lirael watched him for too long, realized when he got to the low bushes that they didn't conceal him as much as he evidently thought they did, and looked away again quickly. The river rushing past reminded her that she also needed to go to the toilet, but she didn't know whether to go around the far side of this small island now or wait for Nick to come back and then go, only deeper into the bushes, and then she wondered why she was thinking about this as being difficult. When she had been traveling with Sam both of them had simply diverted off a ways as required and done their business without even thinking about it, just like the Disreputable Dog; she didn't make a fuss about necessary ablutions. It wasn't because Sam was her nephew, because she hadn't even known that straightaway. He'd just been a young man to her, like Nick. Only not like Nick for some reason . . .

When Nick came back, Lirael offered him a small leather bag.

“Bread and cheese, and a water bottle. It's empty, fill it from the river, the water is good to drink. I'm just . . . I'm just going over there. Like you. Also. I mean, um, your cloak is coming open—”

She fled, with Nick hastily winding the cloak around himself another half turn, making it so tight that he almost fell over as he sat down to eat some bread and cheese.

At the other end of the island, Lirael went to the toilet, then washed her hands and face in the river. The water was very clear and cold, even this far from its source under the Clayr's Glacier. Lirael had seen the spring where the river was born, far beneath the inhabited parts of the Clayr's sprawling underground vastness.

There is a spring. A very old spring. In the heart of the mountain, in the deepest dark.

The Dog had said that, when they were exploring together, shortly before Lirael had found the Dark Mirror and the pan pipes, the instruments of a Remembrancer, which in her case had been but the first step toward becoming an Abhorsen.

Lirael dipped her hand in the cool, clear water again, and sighed. When she was with Sabriel, dealing with the Dead or walking in Death, learning to be an Abhorsen, she didn't have time to think about what she had become, or was becoming, and even less to think about her former life with the Clayr. Not only that, her office as Abhorsen-in-Waiting had proved quite a shield in social situations against the people who Ellimere was always trying to get her to meet and do things with; she need only say that she had Abhorsen business and they left her alone.

But the other side of that coin, Lirael knew, was that she still had almost no experience with how men and women could get together and become friends, let alone lovers, and not much more with how women and women could get together, as some of the Clayr did. Or mixing and matching, as even more of the Clayr considered perfectly straightforward and usual.

It always seemed easy when everyone else did it. Lirael frowned as she thought of various cousins pairing up with each other or venturing down to the Lower Refectory to laugh and drink with the traders and supplicants, later to bring them up to their beds.

Lirael really didn't know how they went about these activities. She had been a loner all her life, one who had the great fortune to make one wonderful friend in the Disreputable Dog. Literally, in this case, since she had somehow summoned the Dog or helped her into existence. But the Dog was gone.

Now Lirael did have a kind of family, even sort-of parents in Sabriel and Touchstone, since she could never think of them as half-sister and brother by marriage. Sam and Ellimere were more like brother and sister to her; certainly they never treated her as an aunt.

But they were all a very work-obsessed family. Or maybe that should be responsibility-obsessed, Lirael thought. She was too, she supposed—but when there weren't Dead creatures to battle or Free Magic entities to be bound, or some immediate problem to face, only
the ordinary social interactions of normal people . . . she didn't know what to do. Even Ellimere, who seemed to be able to make any social situation work exactly as she wanted it to, hadn't been able to fit Lirael into any group of friends or introduce her to potential lovers.

Lirael almost sighed again, but swallowed it. The Disreputable Dog would not have approved of all this sighing. Lirael smiled, a wry, sad smile, and reached into the little pouch she'd affixed to her bell bandolier, beneath Ranna, the smallest bell. Inside that pouch was the soapstone statuette of a black-and-tan dog with sticking-up ears, a wide grin, and a lolling tongue. The statuette she had snatched up from the strange room of the Stilken, many years before, which in some way had been the seed of her conjuring of the Disreputable Dog.

Lirael scratched this little figure between those ears with the edge of one fingernail, then fastened the pouch closed again. She could almost hear the Dog telling her to simply get on with it.

Back near the paperwing, Lirael saw Nick tying the belt from his shredded trousers around the cloak he now wore, to keep it together and not suddenly part in ways unbecoming to his modesty. Which he seemed to care about more than Lirael did, but she had to remember he was from a very different country and upbringing.

“Handmade belt,” he said, and pointed with his left foot. “Like my shoes. Though the laces seem to be going . . . I will need to have words with Mr. Jollie when . . . if I get back to Corvere.”

“Mr. Jollie?” asked Lirael.

“My cobbler,” said Nick. Lirael was pleased to see that he had a little color in his face, and generally looked better than he had the previous night or even that morning. “Machine-made laces! Can you imagine!”

“We will get you new clothes and boots at the Glacier,” said Lirael.

“Oh, good,” said Nick. He hesitated, then added, “I seem to
recall Sam said it was all women. I mean the Clayr were all women.”

“We . . . they are,” said Lirael. “Um, does that matter?”

“Clothes,” said Nick.

Lirael still looked puzzled.

“Men's clothes,” said Nick. “Will I be able to get men's clothes?”

“There are frequent male visitors,” said Lirael. “But . . . we don't really wear different clothes, I mean a few underthings . . .”

She gestured around her chest. Nick nodded and looked away.

“I mean, breeches, a tunic, boots, they're all the same, let out or taken in as required . . .”

“Oh, I see,” said Nick. “Stupid of me. Now, you wear armor and have a sword and those . . . those bells. I suppose you need them. All of it, I mean. Will I get a sword and armor, too? I can fence, reasonably well, fenced épée for the school all the way to the national championship, though I can't say I've ever worn armor, real armor I mean. Will I need it? Armor and a sword?”

“I think at first you will need to rest and fully recover,” said Lirael carefully. She wasn't entirely sure what the Clayr would make of Nick, but she knew it was important to discover what was going to happen with all the Free Magic contained inside him. “You will be quite safe within the Glacier. I mean as long as you stay out of the Library and places like that.”

“Oh, fierce librarians, then?” asked Nick, with a rather forced laugh. “Tell you to shush and that sort of thing?”

“Some of them
are
fierce,” agreed Lirael. She smiled. “Going into battle, at least. Though I'm not sure what ‘shush' means.”

“To be . . . to be quiet,” said Nick. “That's what librarians do, back home. I mean at school they did, the ones . . . the ones at the university are different.”

He did not mention that his knowledge of the university librarians was very limited, as, though he had been up at Sunbere for two terms, he had been following his own studies, had rarely attended a
lecture and only looked into his own college library once, and had never even visited either of the university's two major libraries. He had already been fully under the sway of Orannis then, the Destroyer directing his thoughts and plans.

“They tell you to be quiet?” asked Lirael. “Because you might attract the attention of something dangerous that has escaped the collection?”

“No, not exactly,” said Nick. “Er, your librarians go into battle?”

“When they must,” said Lirael. “The Library is very old, and deep, and contains many things that have been put away for good reason. Creatures, dangerous knowledge, artifacts made not wisely, but too well . . . books that should not be opened without proper preparation, some books that should never be opened at all.”

“Creatures?” asked Nick quietly. The few memories he'd managed to retain about his previous time in the Old Kingdom were often brief moments of seeing . . . hearing . . . smelling strange creatures, things come back from Death, and other monstrosities that his mind wished he had never seen. And the Hrule, of course, the creature in the case . . .

“Yes,” said Lirael. She was thinking of the Stilken, the creature she had found and inadvertently freed in the room of flowers in one of the Old Levels of the Library. She had been very lucky to survive that first encounter—and indeed, the second one—when she had dealt with that creature. Though not without considerable assistance from the Disreputable Dog, even though the hound would have claimed she didn't do anything and wasn't involved.

“I like libraries,” said Nick. He had loved the library at his prep school, but this love had turned sour at Somersby because of Mrs. Knipwich the librarian, who had been soured herself from dealing with several generations of irritating overprivileged schoolboys, and treated all of them as pests on a par with the cockroaches who ate the
bookbinding glue. “Though not necessarily librarians—”

“I was a librarian,” interrupted Lirael stiffly. “A Second Assistant Librarian. Red waistcoat. I suppose I still am one. As well as being Abhorsen-in-Waiting.”

“I'm sorry,” said Nick. “I didn't mean to offend. I liked the librarians at my first school. Just later, I mean Mrs. Knipwich was probably our librarian for too long, she got old and very cranky, a right horror . . .”

His voice trailed off as he realized he was talking nonsense, and worse, nonsense offensive to the librarian in front of him.

“I apologize,” he said.

“It is no matter what you think of librarians, or of me,” said Lirael. She hoped she'd managed to say it as if she didn't care in the least, though in truth she was quite deeply wounded. Becoming a librarian had saved her life, in many ways, giving her an identity she had lacked when she was a Sightless Clayr. It hurt to hear Nick talk disdainfully about librarians, almost as if he were talking about her.

“Please, if you're ready, get back in the paperwing. We still have a long way to fly and we must arrive before nightfall.”

“You don't want any bread and cheese?” asked Nick, offering the pouch. “Or water? I filled up the bottle.”

“No, thank you,” said Lirael, though she was quite hungry. “I can eat as we fly; the paperwing knows the way.”

“Right . . .” said Nick dubiously. He glanced over at the eyes painted on the canoelike bow of the craft. The paperwing winked at him and he dropped the food bag, the bread and cheese tumbling out into the sand, instantly attracting a layer of grit to become inedible.

“Or not eat,” said Lirael shortly. “Please do get in. Do you need to be tied to your seat again? You don't feel faint?”

“No, I'll be fine,” said Nick. He felt quite cross now, both at himself and at Lirael. She seemed far more miffed about an innocent
remark than was reasonable. How was he to know about her being a librarian and everything? And this constant harping on about him being weak and probably fainting, it was too much. He climbed into the paperwing and settled into the hammock-like seat, noting that he too had a kind of long pocket on the left side to hold a sheathed sword, and a broad pocket on the right side for other odds and ends.