Terciel & Elinor (Old Kingdom) Read online

  Dedication

  To my wife, Anna, my sons, Thomas and Edward, and our dog, Snufkin; and to all my family and friends.

  Also to the many readers who have found the Old Kingdom over the years and keep coming back to visit.

  Maps

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Maps

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Books by Garth Nix

  Back Ad

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  The fig tree was ancient and huge, its lower trunk buttressed by enormous roots that rose out of the lawn around it like the fins of some vast subterranean creature, while its upper branches topped out at two hundred feet, a full hundred feet higher than even the red-roofed tower of the Abhorsen’s House nearby.

  A boy, perhaps eight years old, brown-skinned, dark-haired, thin in the face and everywhere else from lack of food, was climbing swiftly up through the branches of the fig with fierce determination. He was wearing ragged, many-times-repaired breeches and a new linen shirt, far too large for him, that had been cinched in the middle with a silk scarf, also new, to make a kind of tunic, and his bare feet were extremely dirty.

  It was very quiet in and around the tree, but the boy climbed in a frenzy, as if he were pursued. Several times he almost lost his grip or footing, but he didn’t slow or falter. Finally, as he neared the top and the branches became slimmer and began to bend and creak, he slowed down. Soon after, reaching a point some twenty or thirty paces short of the crown, he stopped and straddled a horizontal branch, setting his thin shoulders against the gnarled trunk of the mighty tree.

  He couldn’t see much from his vantage point. The leaves were too thick around him. But there were a few spots where the foliage thinned. Through these gaps he could catch a glimpse of the red-roofed tower house below and the white limestone walls that surrounded the island it was built on, an island in the middle of a broad, fast-rushing river that only a few hundred yards to the south plunged over a massive waterfall.

  The boy stared at the mist rising along the line of the cliffs, marveling again at the quiet, the roar of the falls held back from the island by magic, or so he supposed. It had been noisy enough on the riverbank, and almost deafening when the old woman had jumped across the stepping-stones with him on her back, gripping her so hard around the neck she’d told him crossly to stop choking her or they would both die.

  The old woman. She’d said she was his great-aunt, but he didn’t think that could be true. She’d repeated this claim to the beadle at the workhouse in Grynhold, and the mayor, so they would let him go, but they wouldn’t have stopped her anyway. They were all bowing and begging her pardon and asking if she wanted wine or oysters or cake or anything at all the town might give her.

  But all she had wanted was him, and they had been happy to hand him over. No one had asked what he wanted.

  There was a rustle higher above, and a crunching, snapping sound. For a moment the boy thought it was a branch breaking, but the sound went on too long. A continuous crunching noise. He stood up and parted the branches immediately above him. All the boy saw was glaring green, elongated eyes and a broad open mouth full of very sharp white teeth.

  He flinched, lost his footing, and almost fell, but sacrificing skin, he managed to keep his grip on the higher branches. He swung there for a heart-stopping second before he scrabbled his feet back onto a thicker, lower branch.

  Branches creaked above, as if suddenly bearing more weight, and the foliage moved so Terciel got a proper look at what was above him. He was surprised to see it was a man, or sort of a man, because his first, half-seen impression was of something smaller. That said, this man was no taller than Terciel, albeit much broader across the shoulders. He had an odd pinkish nose, and there was that hideous, many-toothed mouth and the huge emerald eyes. Adding to his strangeness, his skin was entirely covered in fine, very white fur or down, which grew longer on his head and chin to give the appearance of hair and a beard. He had been eating fig-bird chicks out of a nest, crunching their tiny bones. There was a feather in the corner of his mouth and a single drop of blood on his broad white chest.

  A red leather collar was fastened tight around his neck, a collar that swarmed with Charter marks to make some sort of spell, and a tiny silver bell hung from the collar. The boy could see the clapper swing inside, but it made no sound, at least not one that he could hear.

  “So,” said whatever this thing was, spitting out the feather. His voice was that of a grown man, and sardonic. “You’re her new one.”

  The boy crouched lower on the branch, ready to drop down to the next branch below, to climb down as fast as or even faster than he had climbed up.

  “Don’t fret,” said the creature. “You’re safe enough from me.”

  “What are you?” asked the boy nervously. He had one foot on the branch below, but he stayed where he was. For the moment. “I mean who? Sir.”

  “Many things once,” said the stranger, yawning. His teeth were even longer and sharper than they had seemed at first, and there were more of them. “I am a servant of the Abhorsens. Or to be more accurate, a slave. I have had many names. Your mistress calls me Moregrim.”

  “The Abhorsen. Her, down there,” said the boy, frowning. He gestured at the house. She’d taken him inside as soon as they arrived and handed him over to two strange magical servants she called Sendings. They were like daytime ghosts, their skin and eyes and hair and everything all Charter marks, uncountable tiny marks in different colors, swarming and crawling about to create the illusion of living people. The Sendings had tried to give him a bath, but he’d managed to escape and climb the tree.

  “Yes indeed,” replied the dwarf, his green eyes sparkling with mischief. “Her down there is the current Abhorsen, and you, I presume, are her latest Abhorsen-in-Waiting. Terciel, that’s your name, isn’t it?”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I listen at doors,” said Moregrim blithely. “And windows. Both the real and the metaphorical.”

  Terciel frowned again, not understanding what the strange creature was talking about.

  “Tell me,” said the dwarf idly, not even looking at the boy. “Have you wielded the bells yet? Touched the handles? Worn the bandolier at least?”

  “What?” asked Terciel. He still wasn’t sure whether to flee down the tree or not. He had climbed it with the idea of hiding there until nightfall, and then trying to escape this island, but with this magical slave of the Abhorsen’s here, that plan had already failed. He looked around, wondering if there was somewhere else he could hide. Apart from the main house and its immediate gardens, there was an orchard, and lawns, and a strange little house or shed to the
south, but nowhere that would offer safety from a search.

  He tried not to think even farther ahead, to how he might cross the river, so swift, with the vast falls so close. The stepping-stones were too far apart for him to jump. Maybe there was a boat. He was good with boats, a true child of the fishing port of Grynhold. Launched from the northern end of the island, where the current would be weaker, maybe—

  “Have you wielded the bells?”

  The bells.

  The sudden change in Terciel’s admittedly already difficult life had started with the appearance of seven bells in a bandolier. One moment they had not been there, and then there they were, in Terciel’s most secret eyrie in between the chimney stacks on the roof of the Grynhold Fish Hall. He’d been steeping a stolen piece of salt fish in a rain bucket, heard something strange, and looked away for less than a second. When he looked back, there was the bandolier, with the mahogany bell handles sticking out of the pouches that kept the bells silent, the handles and the leather crawling all over with glowing Charter marks, which slowly faded from too-bright brilliance as he watched, though they remained visible.

  Terciel had left the bells and his fish, departing across the rooftop in a great rush that set the roosting gulls flying. Despite having the forehead Charter mark himself, he had never been taught magic, since he was an orphan of no account, merely a line in the register of the Grynhold Workhouse, an annoyance to the beadle who oversaw the children there, and nothing more than that to anyone else. His parents, who might have taught him Charter Magic, had drowned when he was two, and his much older sister, Rahi, who had looked after him for a while afterward, had disappeared before he was four. Or thereabouts. He had no memory of his parents at all, and only a vague recollection of his sister.

  Everything he knew about them came from rare answered questions or from overhearing people talk about him, which happened even less frequently. Mostly he was ignored, apart from a cuff to speed him out of the workhouse to the oakum-picking shed, or a cuff to get him back in again at the end of the day, with an occasional caning thrown in if his absence from the daily work was noticed.

  All Terciel knew about magic was that the old healer Maralide made Charter marks appear from nowhere, sketching them in the air and on broken skin and bone, and sometimes they healed a hurt or cured a sickness, and sometimes they didn’t. And what Terciel knew about magical bells came only from stories whispered at night in the workhouse dormitory, whispers backstopped by the constant gurgle of the north aqueduct close by, whose swift running water kept the town safe from the marauding Dead, terrible creatures who were brought back into the living world by awful necromancers who used magical bells.

  Seven bells, carried in a bandolier, worn across the chest.

  Three days after the bells had appeared in Terciel’s eyrie, the old woman had arrived in Grynhold, and shortly after that Terciel had been called to the beadle’s office and then when he had fled instead, since he had numerous petty crimes of fish theft and other misdemeanors that might have come to light, he had been apprehended by an unprecedented collegiate effort on the part of the beadle and her associates, the Grynhold Town Watch, and a large number of fisher-folk who were ashore waiting for the tide to turn before they went out again. It was the last group that had soured Terciel’s attempted escape. The fisher-folk had never bothered the boy before, and he had been hiding among the drying nets.

  They had dragged him before the old woman, and he had met her piercing black eyes, seen her horrendously white face, so much paler than anyone’s ever should be, and then he had looked down to the seven bells she wore in a bandolier across her chest, over an armored coat of unusual design, made of many small interlocking plates, several scored with the mark of weapons that had failed to penetrate.

  Terciel had screamed when he saw the bells, and it had taken the combined effort of the mayor, the beadle, and the woman herself to convince him that she was not a necromancer come to steal his life and use his dead body for some terrible unspecified purpose. They’d explained that bells with Charter marks were special, not the usual necromancer’s tools, and they also were not the same seven bells that had appeared in his eyrie.

  Those bells had come to him specially, the woman said, and it meant he had to go and get them and then he would have to come away with her. That was when she had said she was his great-aunt and her name was Tizanael, and he could call her “Aunt Tizzy.”

  Terciel had noticed everyone else called her “Abhorsen” and bowed low, something the free fishers of Grynhold didn’t do for anyone else.

  With the fisher-folk turned against him, there was nowhere Terciel could hide. He’d climbed the fish hall and carefully picked up the bandolier by the very end of one strap, carried the bells down, and handed them over to the Abhorsen. She said she would keep them until his training began, when they got to the “House,” wherever that was. They’d left soon after, walking out under the aqueduct in the late afternoon, something that filled Terciel with terror. To go beyond the safety of running water, with the night coming on?

  But nothing had happened, then or in the next three days and nights. After a while it occurred to Terciel that this was because he was traveling with someone the creatures of the night were afraid of themselves. He wanted to run away but dared not try anything, not when she was so close.

  Now he was trapped here, on this island on the edge of a waterfall, and he didn’t know what to do.

  Moregrim asked the question again, but Terciel didn’t answer.

  “Could you take my collar off? It itches.”

  Terciel shook his head slowly. He hadn’t touched the bells and he wasn’t going to touch a collar with all those marks glowing and floating upon it, not least when he didn’t know what this creature was.

  The strange man slid along the branch above on all fours, a curiously nimble movement. Terciel noted his fingers were very stubby and ended in claws, and were covered in the same short white hair that was all over his body. He also appeared to have a vestigial tail.

  “Take off my collar!”

  Terciel lowered himself to the branch below, and then the next, climbing down as rapidly as he ever had to escape the workhouse, with the beadle shouting at him from the window above.

  There was shouting here, too, but it came from below.

  “Come down at once!”

  “I am coming down!” he shouted back. He could see her now, on the lawn below the tree, one hand raised in a beckoning motion. For a second he thought there was a bright star on her finger, before he saw it was the afternoon sun catching the ring she wore at the right angle to make it flash.

  “Not you!” called Tizanael, the fifty-first Abhorsen in a line that stretched back over centuries to the very first, whose name had become synonymous with the office. “Him! Come down at once!”

  A white form leapt past Terciel, too close for comfort, gripped a branch with those taloned hands and swung down farther, switchbacking down the branches in swinging falls and crouching leaps, the blocky body moving with incongruous mobility. The boy followed more slowly, losing sight of both the creature and Tizzy as he entered the denser foliage of the lower branches.

  When he finally reached the ground, the dwarf was kneeling in front of Tizanael, his head tilted at a very inhuman angle that obviously was no discomfort. The Abhorsen no longer wore the armor, bell bandolier, and sword, but a robe of dark blue embroidered with a multitude of tiny silver keys, a golden rope in place of a belt, with a small dagger in a metal sheath at her hip. She held her left hand high, the silver ring catching the afternoon sun. The small ruby set in the ring glinted red, like a spark caught upon her finger.

  “You were forbidden to leave the house, Moregrim.”

  “This whole island is often termed the ‘House,’” said the dwarf, with a yawn. “I thought that was what you meant.”

  “I meant the structure to my left,” said Tizanael shortly. “I will now be more specific. You are to remain within the walls
of the building I am indicating until I give you leave otherwise.”

  She pointed at the whitewashed, red-roofed house with its sky-blue door and the door knocker in the shape of a lion’s head, a ring held in its jaws.

  “I also did not give you leave to change your shape,” added Tizanael. “Whether for the purpose of climbing trees or anything else.”

  Moregrim emitted a high-pitched hissing noise and stood up. For a moment Terciel thought the strange, short man was going to attack Tizanael, but instead he bowed low. As he straightened up, he changed, suddenly more humanlike. Now his skin was as pale as the Abhorsen’s, his hair and beard were no longer fur-like, though still luminously white, and he was clothed in a shapeless white smock. The collar that had been around his neck had become a broader red leather belt hitched around his waist, and the small bell swung inside a large bronze buckle. The vestigial tail had entirely disappeared.

  Moregrim bowed, turned away, and headed not toward the front door of the house but to an open gate in the wall on the right-hand side, which led to the kitchen garden. When he was about ten paces away, he turned and snarled, green eyes directed piercingly at Terciel.

  “She killed Rahiniel!”

  Tizanael raised her hand. She did not do anything Terciel could see, but Moregrim writhed and fell over his own feet, rolled twice, and yowled exactly like the cats that frequented the Grynhold Fish Hall, before he got up again and stumbled away through the garden gate.

  Tizanael turned to look at Terciel. Her face, as ever, was set. Not angry or antagonistic, like the beadle’s so often was. This was simply an absence of emotion. Terciel had no idea what she was feeling or thinking.

  “Who’s Rahiniel?” he asked.

  “Your sister,” said Tizanael, watching him carefully. “I believe she was generally known as Rahi.”

  “Rahi?”

  Terciel took in a slow breath. He could almost remember Rahi. At least, he had the faint recollection of someone wrapping him up in a blanket and kissing his forehead as hail clattered on the roof. It had been cozy and warm, so not the workhouse. That was more likely to have been Rahi than his mother. He had been too little when his parents died to remember anything of them.