“We couldn’t save even one,” whispered Lirael. “Not even one.”
Sam didn’t answer. He sat staring past her, out at the moonlit river.
“Come here, Lirael,” said the Dog gently, from her post at the bow. “Help me keep watch.”
Lirael nodded, her lower lip trembling as she tried to keep herself from sobbing. She clambered over the thwarts and threw herself down next to the Dog, and hugged her as hard as she could. The Dog bore this without a word, and said nothing about the tears that spilled off onto her coat.
Eventually, Lirael’s grip loosened, and she slid down. Sleep had claimed her, the kind of sleep that comes only after all strength is exhausted and battles won or lost.
The Dog shifted a little to make Lirael more comfortable and twisted her head to look behind her in a way no normal dog could twist. Sam was asleep, too, curled up in the stern, the tiller moving slightly above his head.
Mogget seemed to be asleep, at his customary post near the mast. But he opened one bright green eye as the Dog looked back.
“I saw it, too,” said Mogget. “On the Greater Dead, that Chlorr.”
“Yes,” said the Dog, her voice troubled. “I trust you will have no trouble remembering where your loyalties lie?”
Mogget didn’t answer. He slowly closed his eye, and a small and secret smile spread across his mouth.
All through the night, the Disreputable Dog sat at the bow, while Lirael tossed and turned beside her. They passed Qyrre in the early, silent hours of the morning, merely a white sail in the distance. Though it had been her original destination, Finder did not try to put in to the dock.
Lirael experienced a mild attack of panic when she awoke to the sound of a waterfall ahead. At this distance, it sounded like the buzz of many insects, and it took her a moment to figure out what it was. Once she did, she had a few anxious moments till she realized that Finder was traveling quite slowly compared to the tree branches, leaves, and other flotsam racing past on either side of them.
“We’re in the channel, approaching Abhorsen’s House,” explained the Dog, as Lirael rubbed the sleep out of her eyes and stretched, in a futile effort to relieve her aches and kinks.
All the deaths of the night before seemed long ago. But not at all like a dream. Lirael knew that the face of the last Southerling, his look of relief as he finally knew he had escaped the Dead, would stay with her forever.
As she stretched, she looked at the huge mass of spray thrown up by the Ratterlin’s fall over the Long Cliffs ahead. The river seemed to disappear into a great cloud that smothered the cliffs and the land beyond in a giant, undulating quilt of white. Then, just for a moment, the mist parted, and she saw a bright tower, its red-tiled, conical roof catching the sun. It looked like a mirage, shimmering in the cloud, but Lirael knew that she had come to Abhorsen’s House at last.
As they drew closer, Lirael saw more red-tiled roofs emerge from the cloud, hinting at other buildings grouped around the tower. But she couldn’t see more, because the whole island the House was built on was surrounded by a whitewashed stone wall that was at least forty feet high. Only the red tiles and some treetops were visible.
She heard Sam come forward from the stern, and he was soon next to her, looking ahead. By unspoken consent, they didn’t talk about what had happened, though the silence was heavy between them.
Finally, desperate to say something, Sam took on the role of a tour guide.
“It doesn’t look it, but the island is larger than a football field. Um, that’s a game I used to play at school, in Ancelstierre. Anyway, the island is about three hundred yards long and a hundred yards wide. There’s a garden and an orchard as well as the House itself—you can just see the blossoms on the peach trees, over on the right. Too early for fruit, though, unfortunately. The peaches here are fantastic, Charter knows why. The House isn’t much compared to the Palace in size, but it is bigger than it looks, and there’s a lot packed into it. Quite a bit different from your Glacier, I guess.”
“I like it already,” said Lirael, smiling, still looking ahead. There was the faint hint of a rainbow in the cloud, arching over the white walls, framing the House with a border of many colors.
“Just as well,” muttered Mogget, as he appeared suddenly at Lirael’s elbow. “Though you should be warned about the cooking.”
“Cooking?” asked the Dog, licking her lips. “What’s wrong with it?”
“Nothing,” said Sam sternly. “The sendings are very good cooks.”
“Do you have sendings for servants?” asked Lirael, who was curious about the difference between the Abhorsen’s life and the Clayr’s. “We do most of the work ourselves at the Glacier. Everyone has to take turns, especially with the cooking, though there are some people who specialize.”
“No one apart from the family ever comes here,” replied Sam. “I mean the extended family—those of the Blood, like the Clayr. And no one has to do anything, really, because there are so many sendings, all eager to help. I think they get bored when the place is empty. Every Abhorsen makes a few sendings, so they kind of multiply. Some are hundreds of years old.”
“Thousands,” said Mogget. “And senile, most of them.”
“Where do we land?” asked Lirael, ignoring Mogget’s mutterings. She couldn’t see any gate or landing spot in the northern wall.
“On the western side,” said Sam, raising his voice to counter the increasing roar of the falls. “We skirt around the island, almost to the waterfall. There’s a landing stage there for the House, and the stepping-stones across to the western tunnel. Look, you can see where the tunnel entrance is, up on the bank.”
He pointed at a narrow ledge halfway up the western riverbank, a grey stone outcrop almost as high as the House. If there was a tunnel entrance there, Lirael couldn’t see it through the mist, and it seemed perilously close to the waterfall.
“You mean there are stepping-stones across that?” exclaimed Lirael, pointing to the edges where the waters rushed over in a torrent that was at least two hundred yards wide, extremely deep and going at a speed Lirael couldn’t even guess at. Worse than that, Sam had told her that the waterfall was more than a thousand feet high. If they were somehow drawn out of the channel, Finder would go over in seconds, and it was a very long way to fall.
“On both sides,” shouted Sam. “They go to the riverbanks, and then there are tunnels that lead down to the bottom of the cliffs. Or you can keep going over the banks and stay on the plateau, if you want.”
Lirael nodded and gulped, looking at the point where the stepping-stones must cross from the House to the western shore. She couldn’t even see them under all the spray and the churning of the water. She hoped she wouldn’t need to, and remembered the Charter-skin that was now safely rolled up in the bag that held The Book of Remembrance and Forgetting, ready to be put on. She could just fly across in the shape of a barking owl, screeching all the way.
A few minutes later, Finder was next to the whitewashed walls. Lirael looked up at them, drawing an imaginary line from the boat’s mast to the top of the walls. Somehow, the walls looked even higher close up, and they had curious marks that even fresh whitewash couldn’t conceal. The sort of stains left by a flood that had reached almost to the top.
Then they were at the wooden landing stage. Finder gently bumped against the heavy canvas fenders that hung there, but any sound from the bump was totally lost in the stomach-vibrating crash of the waterfall. Sam and Lirael quickly unloaded everything, gesturing to make themselves understood. The waterfall was too loud for them to hear even a shout, unless—as Sam demonstrated to Lirael—he was right against her ear, and then it hurt.
When everything was piled up on the landing stage, with Mogget perched on Lirael’s pack and the Dog happily catching spray in her mouth, Lirael kissed Finder’s figurehead on the cheek and pushed the boat off the jetty. She thought she saw the carved face of the woman wink, and her lips curve up in a smile.
“Than
k you,” she mouthed, while Sam bowed at her side, showing his respect. Finder flapped her sail in answer, then swung about and began to move upstream. Sam, watching carefully, noted that the current in the channel had reversed and was moving north, against the flow of the river. Once again, he wondered how it was done and tried to think of how he could get to look at the Charter Stones that were sunk deep in the riverbed below. Perhaps Lirael would teach him how to make an ice-otter Charter-skin—