“Because he was the Queen’s son, clever, and very powerful, he almost achieved his aims. Two of the six Great Stones were broken. The Queen and her daughters were killed. Abhorsen intervened a little too late. True, he did manage to drive him deep into Death—but since his true body has never been found, Rogir has continued to exist. Even from Death, he has overseen the dissolution of the Kingdom—a kingdom without a royal family, with one of the Great Charters crippled, corrupting and weakening all the others. He wasn’t really beaten that night, in the reservoir. Just delayed, and for two hundred years he’s been trying to come back, trying to re-enter Life—”

“He’s succeeded, hasn’t he?” interrupted Sabriel. “He’s the thing called Kerrigor, the one Abhorsens have been fighting for generations, trying to keep in Death. He is the one who came back, the Greater Dead who murdered the patrol near Cloven Crest, the master of the Mordicant.”

“I do not know,” replied Mogget. “Your father thought so.”

“It is him,” Touchstone said, distantly. “Kerrigor was Rogir’s childhood nickname. I made it up, on the day we had the mud fight. His full ceremonial name was Rogirek.”

“He—or his servants—must have lured my father to Belisaere just before he emerged from Death,” Sabriel thought aloud. “I wonder why he came out into Life so near the Wall?”

“His body must be near the Wall. He would need to be close to it,” Mogget said. “You should know that. To renew the master spell that prevents him from ever passing beyond the Final Gate.”

“Yes,” replied Sabriel, remembering the passages from The Book of the Dead. She shivered, but suppressed it, before it became a racking sob. Inside, she felt like screaming, crying. She wanted to flee back to Ancelstierre, cross the Wall, leave the Dead and magic behind, go as far south as possible. But she quelled these feelings, and said, “An Abhorsen defeated him once. I can do so again. But first, we must find my father’s body.”

There was silence for a moment, save for the wind in the canvas and the quiet hum of the rigging. Touchstone wiped his hand across his eyes and looked at Mogget.

“There is one thing I would like to ask. Who put my spirit in Death, and made my body the figurehead?”

“I never knew what happened to you,” replied Mogget. His green eyes met Touchstone’s gaze, and it wasn’t the cat who blinked. “But it must have been Abhorsen. You were insane when we got you out of the reservoir. Driven mad, probably by the breaking of the Great Stones. No memory, nothing. It seems two hundred years is not too long for a rest cure. He must have seen something in you—or the Clayr saw something in the ice . . . ah, that was hard to say. We must be nearing the city, and the sea’s influence lessens. The binding resumes . . .”

“No, Mogget!” exclaimed Sabriel. “I want to know, I need to know, who you are. What’s your connection with the Great . . .”

Her voice locked up in her throat and a startled gargle was the only thing that came out.

“Too late,” said Mogget. He started cleaning his fur, pink tongue darting out, bright color against white fur.

Sabriel sighed, and looked out at the turquoise sea, then up at the sun, yellow disc on a field of white-streaked blue. A light breeze filled the sail above her, ruffling her hair in passing. Gulls rode it on ahead, to join a squawking mass of their brethren, feeding from a school of fish, sharp silver bursting near the surface.

Everything was alive, colorful, full of the joy of living. Even the salt tang on her skin, the stink of fish and her own unwashed body, was somehow rich and lively. Far, far removed from Touchstone’s grim past, the threat of Rogir/Kerrigor and the chilling greyness of Death.

“We shall have to be very careful,” Sabriel said at last, “and hope that . . . what was it you said to the Elder of Nestowe, Touchstone?”

He knew immediately what she meant.

“Hope that the Charter preserves us all.”

Chapter 19

Sabriel had expected Belisaere to be a ruined city, devoid of life, but it was not so. By the time they saw its towers, and the truly impressive walls that ringed the peninsula on which the city stood, they also saw fishing boats, of a size with their own. People were fishing from them—normal, friendly people, who waved and shouted as they passed. Only their greeting was telling of how things might be in Belisaere. “Good sun and swift water” was not the typical greeting in Touchstone’s time.

The city’s main harbor was reached from the west. A wide, buoyed channel ran between two hulking defensive outworks, leading into a vast pool, easily as big as twenty or thirty playing fields. Wharves lined three sides of the pool, but most were deserted. To the north and south, warehouses rotted behind the empty wharves, broken walls and holed roofs testimony to long abandonment.

Only the eastern dock looked lively. There were none of the big trading vessels of bygone days, but many small coastal craft, loading and unloading. Derricks swung in and out; longshoremen humped packages along gangplanks; small children dived and swam in between the boats. No warehouses stood behind these wharves—instead, there were hundreds of open-topped booths, little more than brightly decorated frameworks delineating a patch of space, with tables for the wares, and stools for the vendors and favored customers. There seemed to be no shortage of customers in general, Sabriel noted, as Touchstone steered for a vacant berth. People were swarming everywhere, hurrying about as if their time was sadly limited.

Touchstone let the mainsheet go slack, and brought the boat into the wind just in time for them to lose way and glide at an oblique angle into the fenders that lined the wharf. Sabriel threw up a line, but before she could leap ashore and secure it to a bollard, a street urchin did it for her.

“Penny for the knot,” he cried, shrill voice piercing through the hubbub from the crowd. “Penny for the knot, lady?”

Sabriel smiled, with effort, and flicked a silver penny at the boy. He caught it, grinned and disappeared into the stream of people moving along the dock. Sabriel’s smile faded. She could feel many, many Dead here . . . or not precisely here, but further up in the city. Belisaere was built upon four low hills, surrounding a central valley, which lay open to the sea at this harbor. As far as Sabriel’s senses could tell, only the valley was free of the Dead—why, she didn’t know. The hills, which made up at least two-thirds of the city’s area, were infested with them.

This part of the city, on the other hand, could truly be said to be infested with life. Sabriel had forgotten how noisy a city could be. Even in Ancelstierre, she had rarely visited anything larger than Bain, a town of no more than ten thousand people. Of course, Belisaere wasn’t a big city by Ancelstierran standards, and it didn’t have the noisy omnibuses and private cars that had been significantly adding to Ancelstierran noise for the last ten years, but Belisaere made up for it with the people. People hurrying, arguing, shouting, selling, buying, singing . . .

“Was it like this before?” she shouted at Touchstone, as they climbed up onto the wharf, making sure they had all their possessions with them.

“Not really,” answered Touchstone. “The Pool was normally full, with bigger ships—and there were warehouses here, not a market. It was quieter, too, and people were in less of a rush.”

They stood on the edge of the dock, watching the stream of humanity and goods, hearing the tumult, and smelling all the new odors of the city replacing the freshness of the sea breeze. Cooking food, wood smoke, incense, oil, the occasional disgusting whiff of what could only be sewage . . .

“It was also a lot cleaner,” added Touchstone. “Look, I think we’d best find an inn or hostelry. Somewhere to stay for the night.”

“Yes,” replied Sabriel. She was reluctant to enter the human tide. There were no Dead among them, as far as she could sense, but they must have some kind of accommodation or agreement with the Dead and that stank to her far more than sewage.

Touchstone snagged a passing boy by the shoulder as Sabriel continued to eye the crowd, nose wrinkling. They spoke together for a moment, a silver penny changed hands, then the boy slid into the rush, Touchstone following. He looked back, saw Sabriel staring absently, and grabbed her by the hand, dragging both her and the lazy, fox-fur-positioned Mogget after him.

It was the first time Sabriel had touched him since he’d been revived and she was surprised by the shock it gave her. Certainly, her mind had been wandering, and it was a sudden grab . . . his hand felt larger than it should, and interestingly calloused and textured. Quickly, she slipped her hand out of his, and concentrated on following both him and the boy, weaving across the main direction of the crowd.

They went through the middle of the open-topped market, along one street of little booths—obviously the street of fish and fowl. The harbor end was alive with boxes and boxes of fresh-caught fish, clear-eyed and wriggling. Vendors yelled their prices, or their best buy, and buyers shouted offers or amazement at the price. Baskets, bags and boxes changed hands, empty ones to be filled with fish or lobster, squid or shellfish. Coins went from palm to palm, or, occasionally, whole purses disgorged their shining contents into the belt-pouches of the stallholders.

Towards the other end it grew a little quieter. The stalls here had cages upon cages of chickens, but their trade was slower, and many of the chickens looked old and stunted. Sabriel, seeing an expert knife-man beheading row after row of chickens and dropping them to flop headless in a box, concentrated on shutting out their bewildered featherbrained experience of death.

Beyond the market there was a wide swath of empty ground. It had obviously been intentionally cleared, first with fire, then with mattock, shovel and bar. Sabriel wondered why, till she saw the aqueduct that ran beyond and parallel to this strip of wasteland. The city folk who lived in the valley didn’t have an agreement with the Dead—their part of the city was bounded by aqueducts, and the Dead could no more walk under running water than over it.

The cleared ground was a precaution, allowing the aqueducts to be guarded—and sure enough, Sabriel saw a patrol of archers marching atop it, their regularly moving shapes silhouetted, shadow puppets against the sky. The boy was leading them to a central arch, which rose up through two of the aqueduct’s four tiers, and there were more archers there. Smaller arches continued on each side, supporting the aqueduct’s main channel, but these were heavily overgrown with thornbushes, to prevent unauthorized entry by the living, while the swift water overhead held back the Dead.

Sabriel drew her boat cloak tight as they passed under the arch, but the guards paid them no more attention than was required to extort a silver penny from Touchstone. They seemed very third-rate—even fourth-rate—soldiers, who were probably more constables and watchkeepers than anything else. None bore the Charter mark, or had any trace of Free Magic.

Beyond the aqueduct, streets wound chaotically from an unevenly paved square, complete with an eccentrically spouting fountain—the water jetted from the ears of a statue, a statue of an impressively crowned man.

“King Anstyr the Third,” said Touchstone, pointing at the fountain. “He had a strange sense of humor, by all accounts. I’m glad it’s still there.”

“Where are we going?” asked Sabriel. She felt better now that she knew the citizenry weren’t in league with the Dead.

“This boy says he knows a good inn,” replied Touchstone, indicating the ragged urchin who was grinning just out of reach of the always-expected blow.

“Sign of Three Lemons,” said the boy. “Best in the city, lord, lady.”

He had just turned back from them to go on, when a loud, badly cast bell sounded from somewhere towards the harbor. It rang three times, the sound sending pigeons racketing into flight from the square.

“What’s that?” asked Sabriel. The boy looked at her, open-mouthed. “The bell.”

“Sunfall,” replied the boy, once he knew what she was asking. He said it as if stating the blindingly obvious. “Early, I reckon. Must be cloud coming, or somefing.”

“Everyone comes in when the sunfall bell sounds?” asked Sabriel.

“Course!” snorted the boy. “Otherwise the haunts or the ghlims get you.”

“I see,” replied Sabriel. “Lead on.”

Surprisingly, the Sign of Three Lemons was quite a pleasant inn. A whitewashed building of four storys, it fronted onto a smaller square some two hundred yards from King Anstyr’s Fountain Square. There were three enormous lemon trees in the middle of the square, somehow thick with pleasant-smelling leaves and copious amounts of fruit, despite the season. Charter Magic, thought Sabriel, and sure enough, there was a Charter Stone hidden amongst the trees, and a number of ancient spells of fertility, warmth and bountitude. Sabriel sniffed the lemon-scented air gratefully, thankful that her room had a window fronting the square.

Behind her, a maid was filling a tin bath with hot water. Several large buckets had already gone in—this would be the last. Sabriel closed the window and came over to look at the still-steaming water in anticipation.

“Will that be all, miss?” asked the maid, half-curtseying.

“Yes, thank you,” replied Sabriel. The maid edged out the door, and Sabriel slid the bar across, before divesting herself of her cloak, and then the stinking, sweat- and salt-encrusted armor and garments that had virtually stuck to her after almost a week at sea. Naked, she rested her sword against the bath’s rim—in easy reach—then sank gratefully into the water, taking up the lump of lemon-scented soap to begin removing the caked grime and sweat.

Through the wall, she could hear a man’s—Touchstone’s—voice. Then water gurgling, that maid giggling. Sabriel stopped soaping and concentrated on the sound. It was hard to hear, but there was more giggling, a deep, indistinct male voice, then a loud splash. Like two bodies in a bath rather than one.