And she could taste the awful taint of Free Magic, stronger and more vile than she could ever have imagined, stronger even than her memory of the Stilken. So strong that the bile rose in her throat and she had to force it back, and dots danced before her eyes.
Chapter Thirty
Nicholas and the Pit
He was young, Lirael saw, about her own age. Nineteen or twenty. And obviously ill. He was tall, but stooped over, as if a nagging pain bit his middle. His blond, unkempt hair was clean, but hung together like damp string. His skin was too pink in the cheeks and grey around his lips and eyes. Those eyes were blue, but dulled. He held a pair of dark spectacles loosely in one hand, the arms repaired with twine and one green lens cracked and starred.
He was standing on some sort of artificial hill of rough, loose earth, peering shortsightedly down towards a deep pit, a gaping hole in the ground. The pit—or whatever was in it—was the source of the Free Magic that was making Lirael nauseated, even through the vision. She could feel waves of it pulsating out of the scarred earth, cold and terrible, eating into her bones, biting away deep inside her teeth.
The pit had obviously been freshly dug. It was at least as wide across as the Lower Refectory, which could hold four hundred people. A spiral path wound around its edges, dis-appearing down into the dark depths. Lirael couldn’t see how deep it was, but there were people carrying baskets of dirt and rock up and empty baskets back down. Slow, tired people, who seemed quite strange to Lirael. Their clothes were dirty and torn, but even so, Lirael could see that their cut and color was quite unlike anything she’d ever seen. And nearly all of them wore blue hats or the knotted remnants of blue headscarves.
Lirael wondered how on earth they could work with the corrosive taint of Free Magic all around, and looked at them more closely. Then she gasped and tried to move back, but the vision held her.
They weren’t people. They were Dead. She could feel them now, feel the chill of Death close by. These workers were Dead Hands, enslaved by some necromancer’s will. The blue hats shaded sightless eye sockets, the blue scarves held together rotting heads.
Lirael suppressed her instinctive desire to vomit and quickly looked at the young man next to her, fearful that he might be the necromancer and could somehow see her. But he had no Charter mark on his brow, either whole or perverted to Free Magic. His forehead was clear, save for dirty beads of sweat that had caught the dust from the air, and there was no sign of any bells.
He was looking up now, looking at the sky, and shaking some metal object on his wrist. Perhaps in ritual, Lirael thought. She suddenly felt sorry for him, and had a strange urge to touch the curve of his neck where it joined his ear, just with the very tip of her fingers. She even started to reach out, and was only reminded of where—and what—she was when he spoke.
“Damn it!” he muttered. “Why does nothing work?”
He lowered his arm but kept looking up. Lirael looked too, seeing the dark thunderclouds that roiled there, low and close. Lightning flickered, but there was no cool breeze, no scent of rain. Just the heat and the lightning.
Then, without warning, a blinding bolt of lightning struck down into the pit, lighting the black depths in a bright flash of incandescence. In that moment, Lirael saw hundreds of Dead Hands digging, digging with tools if they had them and with their own rotting hands if not. They paid no attention to the lightning, which burnt and blackened several of their number, nor the deafening crash of thunder that came at almost the same time.
Within a few seconds, another bolt followed the first, seemingly hitting exactly the same place. Then another and another, thunder booming on and on, shaking the ground at Lirael’s feet.
“Four in approximately fifty seconds,” remarked the man to himself. “It’s getting more frequent. Hedge!”
Lirael didn’t understand this last call till a man strode out of the pit below and waved. A thin, balding man, clad in leather armor with gold-etched red enamel steel plates at his throat, elbows, and knees. He had a sword at his side—and a bandolier of bells across his chest, black ebony handles poking out of red leather pouches. Perversions of Charter marks moved across both wood and leather, leaving after-images of fire.
Even from so far away, he smelt of blood and hot metal. He must be the necromancer the Dead Hands served—or one of the necromancers, for there were many Dead. But this one was not the source of the Free Magic that burnt at Lirael’s lips and tongue. Something far worse than he lay hidden in the depths of the pit.
“Yes, Master Nicholas?” called the man. Lirael noted that he waved the two Dead Hands that followed him back down into the shadows, as if he didn’t want them too clearly seen.
“The lightning comes more quickly,” said the young man, so identifying himself to Lirael as Nicholas. But what manner of man—a man without a Charter mark—would a necromancer call Master?
“We must be close,” he added, his voice going hoarse. “Ask the men if they will work an extra shift tonight.”
“Oh, they’ll work!” shouted the necromancer, laughing at some private jest. “Do you want to come down?”
Nicholas shook his head. He had to clear his throat several times before he could shout back, “I feel . . . I feel unwell again, Hedge. I’m going to lie down in my tent. I will look later. But you must call me if you find anything. It will be metal, I think. Yes, shining metal,” he continued, eyes staring as if he saw it in front of him. “Two shining metal hemispheres, each taller than a man. We must find them quickly. Quickly!”
Hedge half bowed, but he didn’t answer. He climbed out of the pit, leaving it to walk up to the hill of tailings where Nicholas stood.
“Who is that with you?” shouted Hedge, pointing.
Nicholas looked to where he pointed but saw nothing save the afterglow of the lightning and the image of the shining hemispheres—the image he saw in all his waking moments, as if it were imprinted on his brain.
“Nothing,” he muttered, looking straight at Lirael. “No one. I am so tired. But it will be a great discovery—”
“Spy! You’ll burn at the feet of my Master!”
Flames leapt from the necromancer’s hands and spilled on the ground, red flames cloaked in black, choking smoke. They raced up the hill like wildfire, straight towards Lirael.
At the same time, she saw Nicholas’s eyes suddenly focus on her.
He reached out one hand in greeting, saying, “Hello! But I expect you’re only another hallucination.”
Then hands gripped her shoulders and she was pulled back into the Observatory as the red fire struck where she’d been and boiled up into a narrow column of fiery destruction and blackest smoke.
Ice shattered, and Lirael blinked. When she opened her eyes, she was standing between Ryelle and Sanar again, in a pool of broken shards, with pieces of blue ice sprinkled across her head and shoulders.
“You Saw,” said Ryelle. It wasn’t a question.
“Yes,” replied Lirael, sorely troubled, as much by the experience of the vision as by what she’d Seen. “Is that what it is like to have the Sight?”
“Not exactly,” replied Sanar. “We mostly See in short flashes, brief fragments from many different parts of the future, all mixed up. Only together, in the Watch, here in the Observatory, can we unify the vision. Even then, only the person who stands where you have stood will See it all.”
Lirael thought about that and craned her head back again, ice dribbling down her neck under her shirt. The distant ceiling was only a patch of ice again. She looked back down and saw that all the Clayr were leaving without a word or a backwards glance. The outer ring had gone before she even noticed, and now the next was uncurling into a single file, leaving by a different door. There seemed to be many exits from the Observatory, Lirael thought. Soon she would take one herself, never to return again.
“What,” Lirael began, forcing herself to think about the vision, “what am I supposed to do?”
“We don’t know,” said Ryelle. “We have been trying to See around the Red Lake for several years, without success. Then all of a sudden we Saw you in the room below, the vision we have shown you, and then a glimpse of you and the man in a boat upon the lake. All are obviously linked in some way, but we have not been able to See more.”