Chlorr struck again, hissing. Sam dodged. Desperately, he tried to think of what he could do. There had to be some spell, something that would at least hold her back long enough for him to get away. . . .
Lirael and the Dog struck together, smashing the last Dead Hand to the ground. Before it could get up, the Dog barked in its face. Instantly, it went limp, no more than a ghastly, misshapen corpse, the spirit banished.
“Thanks,” gasped Lirael. She looked around her, at the grotesque forms of Dead Hands and the pathetic bodies of their victims. Desperately, she hoped to see even just one of the children. But there was no one standing except her and the Dog. There were bodies everywhere, sprawled on the bloodsoaked ground. The cast-off remnants of the Dead Hands piled up with the slaughtered people.
Lirael closed her eyes, her sense of Death almost overpowering her. That sense confirmed what her eyes had already told her.
No one had survived.
She felt sick, the gorge rising in her throat. But as she bent forward to throw up, she suddenly heard Sam shouting. She straightened up, opened her eyes, and looked around. She couldn’t see Sam, but off in the distance there was a blaze of golden fire, interspersed with huge showers of white sparks. It might have been a fireworks display, but Lirael knew better. Even so, it took her a few seconds to work out what Sam was shouting.
When it finally percolated into her stunned, shocked mind, all thought of throwing up disappeared. She jumped over the bodies of the Dead Hands and their victims and started to run. Sam was shouting, “Help! Lirael! Dog! Mogget! Anyone!
Help!”
Sam’s sword had broken on the last exchange of blows. It had snapped off near the hilt, leaving him with a useless dead weight, devoid of magic.
Chlorr laughed. A laugh strange and distant behind her mask, as if it echoed from inside some far-off hall.
She had grown taller as she had stalked after Sam, visibly a thing of darkness under the rotting, splitting furs. Now she
stood head and shoulders above him, white smoke drifting from her mouth as she raised her sword again. Red fire flowed along the blade, and flaming drops fell to the grass.
Sam threw the hilt at her face and jumped back, shouting, “Help! Lirael! Dog!”
The sword came down. Chlorr leapt forward as well, faster and farther than Sam had expected. The blade whisked past his nose. Shocked, he shouted again, “Mogget! Anyone!
Help!”
Lirael saw the necromancer’s sword of red fire come blazing down. Sam fell under the blow, and the red fire obscured Lirael’s vision.
“Sam!” she screamed.
As she screamed, the Disreputable Dog sprang ahead, leaping in great bounds towards Sam and the necromancer.
For a panicked second, Lirael thought Sam had been killed. Then she saw him roll aside, untouched. The necromancer raised her sword again, and Lirael burst her lungs trying to get there in time to do something. But she could not. She was still forty or fifty yards away, and her mind was empty of all the spells that might have crossed the distance and distracted the enemy.
“Die!” whispered Chlorr, raising her sword two-handed above her head, the blade pointing straight down. Sam looked up at it and knew he could not get out of the way in time. She was too fast, too strong. He half raised his hand and tried to speak a Charter mark, but the only one that came to mind was something useless, some mark used in making his toys.
The blade came down.
Sam screamed.
The Disreputable Dog barked.
There was Charter Magic in the bark. It hit Chlorr as she struck. Her arms flashed gold and sizzled, white smoke gouting out of a thousand tiny holes. The blow that should have impaled Sam went awry, the sword sinking deep into the earth, so close that his hip was burnt by the flame.
All Chlorr’s unnatural strength had gone into the blow.
Now she struggled to free the weapon as the Dog advanced upon her, growling. The hound had grown and was now the size of a desert lion, with teeth and claws to match. Her collar shone with golden fire, the Charter marks shifting and joining in a wild dance.
The Dead creature let the sword go and backed away.
Sam struggled to his feet as Chlorr drew back. He clenched his fists as he tried to calm himself, in preparation for casting a spell.
Lirael arrived a second later, completely out of breath. Gasping, she slowed to a walk and moved up behind the Dog.
Chlorr raised one shadowy fist, her fingernails elongating into thin blades of darkness. White smoke still eddied around her, but the holes in her arm had already closed.
She took one step forward, and the Dog barked again.
There was Free Magic power in this bark, reinforced with Charter-spells. Her collar shone even brighter, and Sam and Lirael had to half-close their eyes.
Chlorr flinched and raised her hands to shield her face.
More white smoke poured out from behind her mask, and her body changed shape under the furs. She began to collapse in on herself, her clothes crumpling as the shadowflesh within leaked away.
“Curse you!” she shrieked.
The furs fell to the ground, and the bronze mask bounced on top of them. A shadow as dark and thick as ink flowed away from the Dog and Lirael, moving faster than any liquid ever spilled.
Lirael started to follow, but the Dog blocked her way.
“No,” said the Dog. “Let it go. I have only forced it out of its shape. It is too powerful for me to send back into Death alone, or destroy.”
“It was Chlorr,” said Sam, white-faced and shivering.
“Chlorr of the Mask. A necromancer my mother fought years ago.”
“It is one of the Greater Dead now,” said Mogget. “Back from beyond the Seventh or Eighth Gate.”
Sam jumped several feet into the air. When he looked down, Mogget was sitting quite calmly near Chlorr’s sword, as if he’d been there all the time.
“Where were you?” Sam asked.
“I’ve been looking around while you took care of things here,” explained Mogget. “Chlorr has fled but will return. There are more Dead Hands less than two leagues to the west. A hundred of them at least, with Shadow Hands to lead them.”
“A hundred!” exclaimed Sam as Lirael said, “Shadow Hands!”
“We’d better get back to the boat,” said Sam. He looked at Chlorr’s sword, quivering in the earth. No flames ran down it now, but the steel was as dark as ebony and etched with strange runes that wriggled and convulsed and made him feel nauseated.
“We should destroy this,” he said. His head felt strangely fuzzy, and he found it difficult to think. “But . . . but I don’t know how to do it quickly.”
“What about all these people?” asked Lirael. She couldn’t call them bodies. She still couldn’t believe they were all dead. It had happened so quickly, in just a few frenzied minutes. Sam looked across the field. There were more stars out now, and a slim crescent of a moon had risen. In the cool light he saw that many of the slain people wore blue hats or scarves. A scrap of blue material was caught in the claws of one of the Dead that Lirael had banished with her pipes.
“They’re Southerlings,” he said, surprised.
He walked over for a closer look at the nearest body, a fairhaired boy who couldn’t have been more than sixteen. Sam’s eyes showed more puzzlement than fear, as if he couldn’t believe what was happening. “Southerling refugees. I guess they were trying to escape.”
“Escape from what?” asked Lirael.
Before anyone could answer, a Dead creature howled in the distance. A moment later the howl was taken up by many dessicated, decaying throats.
“Chlorr has reached the Hands,” said Mogget urgently.
“We must leave now!”
The cat hurried away. Sam started to follow, but Lirael grabbed him by the arm.
“We can’t just leave!” protested Lirael. “If we leave them, their bodies will get used—”
“We can’t stay!” protested Sam. “You heard Mogget.
There are too many to fight, and Chlorr will come back too!”
“We have to do something!” Lirael said. She looked at the Dog. Surely the Dog would help her! They had to perform the cleansing rite on the bodies or bind them so they couldn’t be used to house spirits brought from Death.
But the Dog shook her head. “There’s no time,” she said sadly.
“Sam can get the bells!” protested Lirael. “We have to—”
The hound nudged Lirael behind the knee, pushing her on.
The girl stumbled forward, tears welling up in her eyes. Sam and Mogget were already well ahead, hurrying towards the willows.
“Hurry!” said the Dog anxiously, after a glance over her shoulder. She could hear the clicking of many bones and smell decaying flesh. The Dead were closing fast.
Lirael wept as she broke into a shambling jog. If only she could run faster, or knew how to use the panpipes better. She might have been able to save even one of the refugees.
One of the refugees. One had got away from the Dead.
“The man!” she exclaimed, breaking into a run. “The man in the river! We have to rescue him!”
Chapter Forty-Three. Farewell to Finder
Even with the Dog’s highly developed sense of smell and Mogget’s unrivaled night vision, it took almost an hour to find the Southerling who’d managed to reach the river.
He was still floating on his back, but his face was barely above the surface, and he didn’t seem to be breathing. But as Sam and Lirael pulled him in closer to the boat, he opened his eyes and groaned with pain.
“No, no,” he whispered. “No.”
“Hold him,” whispered Lirael to Sam. She quickly reached into the Charter, drawing out several marks of healing. She spoke their names and cupped them in her hand. They glowed there, warm and comforting, as she sought any obvious wounds to place them for best effect. Once the spell was active, they could pull him out of the water.
There was a huge dark stain of dried blood on the man’s neck. But when she moved her hand to it, he cried out and tried to escape from Sam’s grasp.
“No! The evil!”
Lirael pulled her hand back, puzzled. It was obviously Charter Magic she was about to cast. The golden light was clear and bright, and there was no stench of Free Magic.
“He’s a Southerling,” whispered Sam. “They don’t believe in magic, even the superstitions the Ancelstierrans believe in, let alone our magic. It must have been terrible for them when they crossed the Wall.”
“Land across the Wall,” sobbed the man. “He promised us land again. Farms to build, a place of our own . . .”
Lirael tried again to place the spell, but the man shrieked and fought against Sam’s hold. The waves he made ducked his head under several times, till Lirael had to take her hand away and let the spell go, away into the night.
“He’s dying,” said Sam. He could feel the man’s life ebbing away, feel the cold touch of Death reaching out to him.
“What can we do?” asked Lirael. “What—”
“All dead,” said the man, coughing. Blood came out with the river-water, bright in the moonlight. “At the pit. They were dead, but still they did his bidding. Then the poison . . . I told Hral and Mortin not to drink . . . four families—”
“It’s all right,” said Sam soothingly, though his voice was nearly breaking. “They . . . they got away.”
“We ran, and the Dead followed,” whispered the Southerling. His eyes were bright, but they saw something other than Sam and Lirael. “Night and day we ran. They dislike the sun. Torbel hurt his ankle, and I couldn’t . . . couldn’t carry him.”
Lirael reached across and stroked the man’s head. He flinched at first, but relaxed as he saw no strange light in her hands.
“The farmer said the river,” continued the dying man. “The river.”
“You made it,” said Sam. “This is the river. The Dead cannot cross running water.”
“Ahh,” sighed the man, and then he was gone, slipping away to that other river, the one that would carry him to the Ninth Gate and beyond.
Sam slowly let go. Lirael raised her hand. The water closed over the man’s face, and Finder steered away.
“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.