Sam woke quickly when she shook him, his hand going to his sword. They didn’t speak – something about the quiet of the night forestalled any conversation. Lirael covered the fire as Sam splashed water on his face, and they helped each other shoulder their packs. The Dog loped backwards and forwards as they got ready, her tail wagging, all eagerness to be off again.
The Steps began in a deep cut that went straight into the cliff for twenty yards, so at first it seemed it would become a tunnel. But it was open to the sky, and it soon turned to run along and up the cliff, striking westward. Each step was exactly the same size, in height and breadth and depth, so the climb was regular and relatively easy, though still exhausting.
As they climbed, Lirael came to understand that the cliff was not, as she had thought, a single almost vertical face of rough stone. It was actually composed of hundreds of faces of slipped rock, as if a sheaf of paper had been propped up and many individual pages had slipped down. The stepped path was mainly built between and on top of the faces, running along till it had to turn and be cut back deeper into the cliff in order to reach the next higher face.
The moon rose higher as they climbed, and the sky became much lighter. There was moon shadow now, and whenever they stopped for a rest, Lirael looked out to the lands beyond, to the distant hills to the south and the silver-brushed trail of the Ratterlin to the east. She had often flown in owl shape above the Clayr’s Glacier and the twin mountains of Starmount and Sunfall, but that was different. Owl senses were not the same, and back there she had always known that come the dawn, she would be safely tucked in bed, secure in the fastness of the Clayr. Those flights had been pure adventure. This was something much more serious, and she could not simply enjoy the cool of the night and the bright moon.
Sam looked out, too. He couldn’t see the Wall to the south – it was over the horizon – but he recognised the hills. Barhedrin was one, Cloven Crest of old, where there was a Charter Stone and, since the Restoration, a tower that was the Guard’s southernmost headquarters. Beyond the Wall was the country of Ancelstierre. A strange country, even to Sameth, who had gone to school there. A country without the Charter or Free Magic, save for its northern regions, close to the Old Kingdom. Sameth thought of his mother and father there, far off to the south. They were trying to find a diplomatic solution to stop the Ancelstierrans from sending Southerling refugees across the Wall to their certain deaths and, after that, to serve at the command of the necromancer Hedge. It could be no coincidence, Sam thought grimly, that this Southerling refugee problem had arisen at the same time that Hedge was masterminding the digging up of the ancient evil that was imprisoned near the Red Lake. It all smacked of a long-term, well-laid plan, on both sides of the Wall. Which was extremely unusual and did not bode well. What could a necromancer of the Old Kingdom really hope to gain from the world beyond the Wall? Sabriel and Touchstone thought their Enemy’s plan was to bring hundreds of thousands of the Southerlings across the Wall, kill them by poison or spell and make them into an army of the Dead. But the more Sam thought about it, the more he wondered. If that was the Enemy’s sole intention, what was being dug up? And what part did his friend Nicholas have to play in it all?
The rests became more frequent as the moon slowly drifted down the sky. Though the steps were regular and well made, it was a steep climb and they were tired to begin with. The Dog kept loping ahead, occasionally doubling back to make sure her mistress was keeping up, but Lirael and Sam were faltering. They trod with mechanical regularity and their heads were bowed. Even the sight of a nest full of cliff owl chicks near the path attracted only a brief look from Lirael and not even a glance from Sameth.
They were still climbing when a red glow started to the east, colouring the moon’s cold light. Soon it became bright enough to make the moon fade, and birds began to sing. Tiny swifts issued from cracks all along the cliff, flying out to chase insects rising with the morning wind.
“We must be close to the top,” said Sam as they paused to rest, the three of them strung out along the narrow way: the Dog at the top, as high as Lirael’s head, and Sameth below her, his head at about her knee level.
Sam leant against the cliff face as he spoke, only to recoil with a cry as an unnoticed thorn tree pricked him in the legs.
For a moment Lirael thought he would fall, but he recovered his balance and twisted himself around to pick out the thorns.
The Steps were considerably scarier in daylight, Lirael thought as she looked down. All it would take was a step to the left and she would fall, if not the whole way down, at least to the next rock slip. That was twenty yards below them here, enough to break bones if it didn’t kill immediately.
“I never realised!” said Sam, who had stopped pulling out thorns and was kneeling down to brush away the dust and fragments of stone on the steps in front of him. “The steps are made of brick! But they would have had to cut into the stone anyway, so why face the stone with brick?”
“I don’t know,” replied Lirael, before she caught on that Sam had actually been asking himself. “Does it matter?”
Sam stood up and brushed his knees.
“No, I suppose not. It’s just odd. It must have been an enormous job, particularly as I can’t see any sign of magical assistance. I suppose sendings could have been used, though they do tend to shed the odd mark here and there...”
“Come on,” said Lirael. “Let’s get to the top. Perhaps there will be some clue to the Steps’ making there.”
But well before they came to the top of the Steps, Lirael had lost all interest in plaques or builders’ monuments. A terrible foreboding that had been lurking in the back of her mind grew stronger as they climbed the last few hundred feet, and slowly it became more and more concrete. She could feel a coldness in her gut and she knew that what awaited them at the top would be a place of death. Not recent death, not within the day, but death nonetheless.
She knew Sam felt it too. They exchanged bleak looks as the Steps widened at last near the top. Without needing to talk about it, they moved from single file to a line abreast. The Dog grew slightly larger and stayed close to Lirael’s side.
Lirael’s sense of death was confirmed by the breeze that hit them on the last few steps. A breeze that carried with it a terrible smell, giving a few moments’ warning before they reached the top of the Steps, to look out on a barren field strewn with the bodies of many men and mules. A great gathering of ravens clustered around and on the corpses, tearing at flesh with their sharp beaks and squabbling amongst themselves.
Fortunately, it was immediately clear the ravens were normal birds. They flew away as soon as the Disreputable Dog ran forward, croaking their displeasure at the interruption to their breakfast. Lirael could not sense any Dead among them or nearby, but she still drew Saraneth and her sword, Nehima. Even from a distance, her necromantic senses told her the bodies had been there for days, though the smell could have told her just as much.
The Dog ran back to Lirael and tilted her head in question. Lirael nodded and the hound loped off, sniffing the ground around the bodies in wider and wider circles till she disappeared out of sight behind a particularly large clump of thorn trees. There was a body hanging from the tallest tree, tossed there by some great wind or a creature far stronger than any man.
Sam came up next to Lirael, his sword in hand, the Charter marks on the blade glowing palely in the sun. It was full dawn now, the light rich and strong. It seemed wrong for this field of death, Lirael thought. How could good sunshine play across such a place? There should be fog and darkness.