Abhorsen (2 page)

Despite Damed’s worries, the police did their job well, separating the throng so that the two cars could speed through. A few bricks and stones were hurled after them, but they missed the riding guards or bounced off the hardened glass and armor plate. Within a minute, the crowd was left behind, just a dark, shouting mass in the fog.

“The escort is not following,” said Damed, who was riding the running board next to the front car’s driver. A detachment of mounted police had been assigned to accompany King Touchstone and his Abhorsen Queen wherever they went in the city, and up to now they had performed their duty to the expected standards of the Corvere Police Corps. This time the troopers were still standing by their horses.

“Maybe they got their orders mixed up,” said the driver through her open quarter window. But there was no conviction in her voice.

“We’d better change the route,” ordered Damed. “Take Harald Street. Left up ahead.”

The cars sped past two slower automobiles, a heavily laden truck, and a horse and wagon, braked sharply, and curved left into the broad stretch of Harald Street. This was one of the more modern promenades, and better lit, with gas lamps on both sides of the street at regular intervals. Even so, the fog made it unsafe to drive faster than fifteen miles per hour.

“Something up ahead!” reported the driver. Damed looked up and swore. As their headlights pierced the fog, he saw a great mass of people blocking the street. He couldn’t make out what was on the banners they held, but it was easy enough to recognize it as an Our Country demonstration. To make it worse, there were no police to keep them in check. Not one blue-helmeted officer in sight.

“Stop! Back up!” said Damed. He waved at the car behind, a double signal that meant “Trouble!” and “Retreat!”

Both cars started to back up. As they did, the crowd ahead surged forward. They’d been silent till then. Now they started shouting, “Foreigners out!” and “Our Country!” The shouts were accompanied by bricks and stones, which for the moment fell short.

“Back up!” shouted Damed again. He drew his pistol, holding it down by his leg. “Faster!”

The rear car was almost back at the corner when the truck and the wagon they’d passed pulled across, blocking the way. Masked men dropped out of the backs of both vehicles, sending the fog shivering as they ran. Men with guns.

Damed knew even before he saw the guns that this was what he had feared all along.

An ambush.

“Out! Out!” he shouted, pointing at the armed men. “Shoot!”

Around him the other guards were opening car doors for cover. A second later they opened fire, the deeper boom of their pistols accompanied by the sharp tap-tap-tap of the new, compact machine rifles that were so much handier than the Army’s old Lewins. None of the guards liked guns, but they had practiced with them constantly since coming south of the Wall.

“Not the crowd!” roared Touchstone. “Only armed targets!”

Their attackers were not so careful. They had gone under their vehicles, behind a post box, and down on the footpath beside a low wall of flower boxes, and were firing wildly.

Bullets richocheted off the street and the armored cars in mad, zinging screeches. There was noise everywhere, harsh, confused sound, a mixture of screaming and shouting combined with the constant crack and chatter of gunfire. The crowd, so eager to rush forward only seconds before, had become a terrible, tumbling crush of people trying to flee.

Damed rushed to a knot of guards crouched behind the engine of the rear car.

“The river,” he shouted. “Go through the square and down the Warden Steps. We have two boats there. You’ll lose any pursuit in the fog.”

“We can fight our way back to the Embassy!” retorted Touchstone.

“This is too well planned! The police have turned, or enough of them! You must get out of Corvere. Out of Ancelstierre!”

“No!” shouted Sabriel. “We haven’t finished—”

She was cut off as Damed violently pushed her and Touchstone over and leaped above them. With his legendary quickness, he intercepted a large black cylinder that was tumbling through the air, trailing smoke behind it.

A bomb.

Damed caught and threw it in one swift motion, but even he was not fast enough.

The bomb exploded while it was still in the air. Packed with high explosive and pieces of metal, it killed Damed instantly. The blast broke every window for half a mile and momentarily deafened and blinded everyone within a hundred yards. But it was the thousands of metal fragments that did the real damage, ripping and screaming through the air, to bounce off stone or metal, or all too often to cut through flesh.

Silence followed the explosion, save for the roar of the burning gas from the shattered lamps. Even the fog had been thrown back by the force of the blast, which had cleared a great circle open to the sky. Rays of weak sunshine filtered through, to illuminate a scene of terrible destruction.

There were bodies strewn all around and under the cars, not one overcoated guard still on his or her feet. Even the car’s armored windows were broken, and the occupants were slumped in death.

The surviving assassins waited for a few minutes before they crawled out from behind the low wall and moved forward, laughing and congratulating one another, their weapons cradled casually under their arms or across their shoulders with what they imagined was debonair style.

The talk and laughter were too loud, but they didn’t notice. Their senses were battered, their minds in shock. Not only from the explosion or the terrible sights that drew closer and more real with every step, or even with relief at being alive in the midst of so much death and destruction.

The real shock came from the realization that it was three hundred years since a King and a Queen had been slain on the streets of Corvere. Now it had happened again—and they had done the deed.

PART
ONE

Chapter One

A House Besieged

THERE WAS ANOTHER
fog, far away from the smog of Corvere. Six hundred miles to the north, across the Wall that separated Ancelstierre from the Old Kingdom. The Wall where the Old Kingdom’s magic really began and Ancelstierre’s modern technology failed.

This fog was different from its far-southern cousin. It was not white but the dark grey of a storm cloud, and it was completely unnatural. This fog had been spun from air and Free Magic and was born on a hilltop far from any water. It survived and spread despite the heat of a late-spring afternoon, which should have burned it into nothing.

Ignoring sun and light breezes, the fog spread from the hill and rolled south and east, thin tendrils creeping out in advance of the main body. Half a league on from the hill, one of these tendrils separated into a cloud that rose high in the air and crossed the mighty river Ratterlin. Once across, it sank to sit like a toad on the eastern bank, and new fog begun to puff out of it.

Soon the two arms of fog shrouded both western and eastern shores of the Ratterlin, though the sun still shone on the river in between.

Both river and fog sped at their very different paces towards the Long Cliffs. The river dashed along, getting faster and faster as it headed to the great waterfall, where it would plunge down more than a thousand feet. The fog was slow and threatening. It thickened and rose higher as it rolled on.

A few yards before it reached the Long Cliffs, the fog stopped, though it still grew thicker and rose higher, threatening the island that sat in the middle of the river and on the edge of the waterfall. An island with high white walls that enclosed a house and gardens.

The fog did not spread across the river, nor lean in too far as it rose. There were unseen defenses that held it back, that kept the sun shining on the white walls, the gardens, and the red-tiled house. The fog was a weapon, but it was only the first move in a battle, only the beginning of a siege. The battle lines were drawn and the House invested.

For the whole river-circled isle was Abhorsen’s House. Home to the Abhorsen, whose birthright and charge was to maintain the borders of Life and Death. The Abhorsen, who used necromantic bells and Free Magic, but who was neither necromancer nor Free Magic sorcerer. The Abhorsen, who sent any Dead who trespassed in Life back to whence they came.

The creator of the fog knew that the Abhorsen was not actually in the House. The Abhorsen and her husband, the King, had been lured across the Wall and would presumably be dealt with there. That was part of her Master’s plan, long since laid but only recently begun in earnest.

The plan had many parts, in many countries, though the very heart and reason for it lay in the Old Kingdom. War, assassination, and refugees were elements of the plan, all manipulated by a scheming, subtle mind that had waited generations for everything to come to fruition.

But as with any plan, there had already been complications and problems. Two of them were in the House. One was a young woman, who had been sent south by the witches who lived in the glacier-clad mountain at the Ratterlin’s source. The Clayr, who Saw many futures in the ice, and who would certainly try to twist the present to their own ends. The woman was one of their elite mages, easily identified by the colored waistcoat she wore. A red waistcoat, marking her as a Second Assistant Librarian.

The maker of the fog had seen her, black haired and pale skinned, surely no older than twenty, a mere fingernail sliver of an age. She had heard the young woman’s name, called out in desperate battle.

Lirael.

The other complication was better known, and possibly more trouble, though the evidence was conflicting. A young man, hardly more than a boy, curly haired from his father, black eyebrowed from his mother, and tall from both. His name was Sameth, the royal son of King Touchstone and the Abhorsen Sabriel.

Prince Sameth was meant to be the Abhorsen-in-Waiting, heir to the powers of
The Book of the Dead
and the seven bells. But the maker of the fog doubted that now. She was very old, and once she had known a great deal about the strange family and their House in the river. She had fought Sameth barely a night past, and he had not fought like an Abhorsen; even the way he cast his Charter Magic was strange, reminiscent of neither the royal line nor the Abhorsens.

Sameth and Lirael were not alone. They were supported by two creatures who appeared to be no more than a small bad-tempered white cat and a large black and tan dog of friendly disposition. Yet both were much more than they seemed, though exactly what they were was another slippery piece of information. Most likely they were Free Magic spirits of some kind, bound in service to the Abhorsen and the Clayr. The cat was known to some degree. His name was Mogget, and there was speculation about him in certain books of lore. The Dog was a different matter. She was new, or so old that any book that told of her was long since dust. The creature in the fog thought the latter. Both the young woman and her hound had come from the Great Library of the Clayr. It was likely both of them, like the Library, had hidden depths and contained unknown powers.

Together, these four could be formidable opponents, and they represented a serious threat. But the maker of the fog did not have to fight them directly, nor could she, for the House was too well guarded by both spell and swift water. Her orders were to make sure that they were trapped in the House. The House was to be besieged while matters progressed elsewhere—until it was too late for Lirael, Sam, and their companions to do anything at all.

Chlorr of the Mask hissed as she thought of those orders, and fog billowed around what passed for her head. She had once been a living necromancer, and she took orders from no one. She had made a mistake, a mistake that had led to her servitude and death. But her Master had not let her go to the Ninth Gate and beyond. She had been returned to Life, though not in any living form. She was a Dead creature now, caught by the power of bells, bound by her secret name. She did not like her orders yet had no choice but to obey.

Chlorr lowered her arms. A few feathery tendrils of fog issued from her fingers. There were Dead Hands all around her, hundreds and hundreds of swaying, suppurating corpses. Chlorr had not brought the spirits that inhabited these rotten, half-skeletal bodies out of Death, but she had been given command of them by the one who had. She raised one thin, long arm of shadow and pointed. With sighs and groans and gurgles and the clicking of frozen joints and broken bones, the Dead Hands marched forward, sending the fog swirling all around them.

“There are at least two hundred Dead Hands on the western bank, and fourscore or more to the east,” reported Sameth. He straightened up from behind the bronze telescope and swung it down out of the way. “I couldn’t see Chlorr, but she must be there somewhere, I guess.”

He shivered as he thought of the last time he’d seen Chlorr, a thing of malignant darkness looming above him, her flaming sword about to fall. That had been only the night before, though it already felt much longer ago.