“I wonder if I should take—” Lirael said, reaching out for one of the torches. But even before her hand could close on it, the torch puffed into dust. Lirael flinched, almost falling over the Dog, who stepped back into Sam.
“Watch it!” Sam called out. His voice echoed in the well shaft and reverberated past Lirael down the corridor.
Lirael reached out again, more gingerly, but the other torches also simply fell into dust. When she touched the bucket, it collapsed in on itself, becoming a pile of rusted shards.
“Time never truly falters,” said the Dog enigmatically.
“I guess we have to go on,” said Lirael, but she was really only speaking to herself. They didn’t need the torches, but she would have felt better with one.
“The faster the better,” said the Dog. She was sniffing the air again. “We do not want to tarry anywhere under here.”
Lirael nodded. She took one step forward, then hesitated and drew her sword. Charter marks burnt brightly on the blade as it came free of the scabbard and the name of the sword rippled down the steel, briefly changing into the inscription Lirael had seen before. Or was it different? She couldn’t remember, and the words rippled away too quickly for her to be sure.
The Clayr Saw asword and so Iwas. Remember the Wallmakers. Remember Me.
Whatever it said, the extra light reassured Lirael, or perhaps it was just the feel of Nehima in her hand.
She heard Sam draw his sword behind her. He waited for a few seconds as she started on again. Obviously he did not want to trip and impale the Dog or Lirael from behind, a precaution Lirael thoroughly approved.
For the first hundred paces or so, the passageway was of worked stone. Then that suddenly ended and they came to a tunnel that was not the work of any tool. The red rock gave way to a pallid greenish-white stone that reflected the Charter lights, making Lirael hood her eyes. The tunnel seemed to have been eroded rather than worked, and there were the patterns of many swirls and eddies upon the ceiling, floor and walls. Yet even these seemed strange, contrary to what they ought to be, though Lirael didn’t know why. She just felt their strangeness.
“No water ever cut this way,” said Sam. He was whispering too, now. “Unless it flowed back and forth at the same time on different levels. And I have never seen this kind of stone.”
“We must hurry,” said the Dog. There was something in her voice that made Lirael move more quickly. An anxiety she had not heard before. Perhaps it was even fear.
They began to walk more swiftly, as fast as they could without risk of tripping over or falling into some unsuspected hole. The strange, glowing tunnel continued on for what felt like several miles, then opened into a cavern, again carved by unknown means out of the same reflective stone. There were three tunnels off this, and Lirael and Sam stopped while the Dog sniffed carefully at each entrance.
There was a pile of what Lirael thought was stone in one corner of the cavern, but when she looked at it more closely, she realised it was actually a mound of old, powdery bones mixed with pieces of metal. Touching the mound with the corner of her boot, she separated out several shards of tarnished silver and the fragment of a human jaw, still showing one unbroken tooth.
“Don’t touch it,” Sam warned in a hasty whisper, as Lirael bent to inspect the metal fragments.
Lirael stopped, her hand still outstretched.
“Why not?”
“I don’t know,” replied Sam, an unconscious shiver rippling across his neck. “But that’s bell metal, I think. Best to leave it alone.”
“Yes,” agreed Lirael. She stood up and couldn’t help shivering herself. Human bones and bell metal. They had found Kalliel. What was this place? And why was the Dog taking so long to decide which way to go?
When she voiced the question, the Disreputable Dog stopped her sniffing and pointed her right paw to the centre tunnel.
“This one,” she said, but Lirael noted a certain lack of enthusiasm in the Dog. The hound had not spoken with total confidence and even her pointing had wavered. If she had been in a pointing competition, she would have lost points.
The tunnel was significantly wider than the previous one, and the ceiling higher. It also felt different to Lirael, and not because there was more room to move. At first she couldn’t place what it was; then she realised the air around her was growing colder. And she had a strange sensation around her feet and ankles, almost as if there were something rushing around her heels. A current that swished one way and then the other, but there was no water there.
Or was there? When she looked directly in front or down, Lirael saw stone. But when she looked out of the corners of her eyes, she could see dark water flowing. Coming from behind them, pushing past and then curling back, like a wave falling upon the shore. A wave that was trying to knock them down and sweep them back the way they’d come.
In a very unsettling way, it reminded her of the river of Death. But she did not feel they were in Death, and apart from the growing cold and the peripheral view of the river, all her senses told her that she was firmly in Life, though in a very strange tunnel, far underground.
Then she smelled rosemary again, with something sweeter, and at that moment the bells in the bandoleer across her chest began to vibrate in their pouches. Their clappers stilled by leather tongues, they could not sound, but she could feel them moving and shaking, as if they were trying to break free.
“The bells!” she gasped. “They’re shaking... I don’t know what...”
“The pipes!” cried Sam, and Lirael heard a brief cacophany as the panpipes sounded with the voices of all seven bells, before they were suddenly cut off.
“No!” shouted a voice that was not instantly recognisable as Mogget’s. “No!”
“Run!” roared the Dog.
Amidst the shouts and yells and roaring, the Charter light above Lirael’s head suddenly dimmed to little more than a faint glow.
Then it went out.
Lirael stopped. There was some light from the marks on Nehima’s blade, but these were fading too, and the sword was twisting strangely in her hand. Undulating in a way that no thing of steel could ever move, it had become alive, not so much a sword any more as an eel-like creature, writhing and growing in her grasp. The green stone on the pommel had become a bright, lidless eye, and the silver wire on the hilt had become a row of shining teeth.
Lirael shut her eyes and sheathed the sword, ramming it hard into the scabbard before she let go with relief. Then she opened her eyes and looked around. Or tried to. All the golden Charter light was gone and it was dark. The total darkness of the deep earth.
In the black void Lirael heard cloth tear and rip, and Sam cried out.
“Sam!” she cried. “Over here! Dog!”
There was no answer, but she heard the Dog growl, and then there was a soft, low laugh. A horrible, gloating chuckle that set the hair on the back of her neck on edge. It was made worse because there was something familiar in it. Mogget’s laugh, twisted and made more sinister.
Desperately Lirael tried to reach for the Charter, to summon a new light spell. But there was nothing there. Instead of the Charter she felt a terrible, cold presence that she knew at once. Death. That was all she could feel.
The Charter was gone, or she could not reach it.
Panic began to flower in her as the gloating chuckle deepened and the darkness pressed upon her. Then Lirael’s eyes registered a faint change. She became aware of subtle greys in the darkness, and she felt a momentary hope that there would be light. Then she saw the barest fingernail scraping of illumination spark and fizz and steadily grow till it became a pool of fierce, bright, white light. With the light came the hot metal stench of Free Magic, a smell that rolled across in waves, each one causing a reflex gag as the bile rose in Lirael’s throat.