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The sending held the sword extended for a few seconds without a waver. Then, so quickly she didn’t see it move, the point flicked against Lirael’s throat—just enough to break the skin, capturing a single bead of blood on the very tip of the blade.
Lirael gulped down a startled cry but remained frozen, fearful that it would strike again if she flinched. She knew much of the lore of sendings, having continued her studies even after “creating” the Dog. But she could not gauge the true purpose of this one. For the first time since she had gone to confront the Stilken, she felt afraid, and the chill dread of Charter Magic gone wrong welled up inside her bones.
The sending lifted its sword again, and Lirael did flinch this time, unable to control the twitch of fright. But the guard was simply making that drop of blood run down the gutter of the blade in a slow, stately roll, like a bead of oil, not leaving a trace on the Charter-woven steel. After what seemed an age, the bead reached the hilt and sank into the crossguard like butter into toast.
Behind Lirael, the Dog let out a long, half-woofed sigh, even as the sending saluted with the sword—and broke apart, the Charter symbols that had made it momentarily real spinning out into the air before fading away into nothingness. In a few seconds, no sign of the sending remained.
Lirael realized she’d been holding her breath, and let it out with a relieved whoosh. She touched her neck, expecting to feel the unpleasant wetness of blood. But there was nothing, no cut, not even a slight unevenness in the skin.
The Dog’s snout nudged her behind the knee. Then the hound slipped past and grinned back at her.
“Well, you passed that test,” she said. “You can open the door now.”
“I’m not sure I want to,” replied Lirael thoughtfully, still fingering her neck. “Maybe we should go back.”
“What!” exclaimed the Dog, her ears sticking up in disbelief. “Not look? Since when have you become Miss We Shouldn’t Be Here?”
“It could have cut my throat,” said Lirael, her voice trembling. “It nearly did.”
The Disreputable Dog rolled her eyes and collapsed onto her front paws in exasperation. “It was only testing you, to make sure you have the Blood. You’re a Daughter of the Clayr—no Charter-made creature would harm you. Though as the greater world is full of danger, you’d better start getting used to the idea that you can’t give up at the first thing that scares you!”
“Am I a Daughter of the Clayr?” whispered Lirael, tears starting in her eyes. She had held her sorrow in all year, but it was always worst on her birthday. Now it could not be repressed. She crouched down and hugged the Dog, ignoring the damp reek of dog-smell. “I’m nineteen and I still haven’t got the Sight. I don’t look like everyone else. When that sending put out its sword, I suddenly realized that it knew. It knew I’m not a Clayr, and it was going to kill me.”
“But it didn’t, because you are a Clayr, idiot,” said the Dog, quite gently. “You’ve seen the hunting dogs, how every now and then one will be born with floppy ears or have a brown back instead of gold. They’re still part of the pack. You’re just a floppy-ear.”
“But I can’t See the future!” cried Lirael. “Would the pack accept a dog that couldn’t smell?”
“You can smell,” said the Dog, rather illogically. She licked Lirael’s cheek. “Besides, you have other gifts. None of the others are half the Charter Mage you are, are they?”
“No,” whispered Lirael. “But Charter Magic doesn’t count. It’s the Sight that makes the Clayr. Without it, I am nothing.”
“Well, perhaps there are other things you can learn,” encouraged the Dog. “You might find something else—”
“What? Like an interest in embroidery?” Lirael said in a depressed monotone, cradling her head in her tear-dampened forearms. “Or perhaps you think I should take up leatherwork?”
“That,” said the Dog, her voice losing all sympathy, “is self-pity, and there’s only one way to deal with it.”
“What?” asked Lirael sullenly.
“This,” said the Dog, lunging forward and nipping her quite sharply on the leg.
“Ow!” Lirael shrieked, leaping up and stumbling against the door. “What did you do that for?”
“You were being pathetic,” said the Dog, as Lirael rubbed the spot on her calf where visible tooth-marks indented her soft wool leggings. “Now you’re just cross, which is an improvement.”
Lirael eyed the Dog balefully but didn’t answer, because she couldn’t think of anything to say that wouldn’t—quite accurately—be seen as sulky or bad-tempered. Besides, she remembered a particular dog bite from her seventeenth birthday and had no desire to add a nineteenth-birthday scar.
The Dog stared back, her head tilted to one side, ears cocked, waiting for some sort of reply. Lirael knew from experience that the Dog could sit like that for hours if necessary, and gave up the struggle to maintain her self-pity. Clearly, the Dog just didn’t understand how important it was to have the Sight.
“So—how do I open this?” asked Lirael.
Without realizing it, she’d been leaning against the door, catching her balance there after the nip-assisted leap. She could feel the Charter Magic in it, warm and rhythmic under the palm of her hand, moving in slow counterpoint to the pulse in her wrist and neck.
“Give it a push,” suggested the Dog, moving closer, sniffing at the crack where the door met the floor. “The sending probably unlocked it for you.”
Lirael shrugged and placed both palms against the door. Curiously, the metal studs seemed to have moved while she wasn’t looking. They had been all mixed up but were now sorted into three distinct patterns, though there was no obvious meaning to them. Lirael wasn’t sure which particular symbols were under her palms, though she could feel them leaving an imprint on her skin.
Even the metal studs were impregnated with Charter symbols, Lirael felt. She didn’t know precisely what they were, but it was clear the door was a major work of magic, the result of many months of superior spell-casting and equally masterful metalwork and carpentry.
She pushed once, and the door groaned. She pushed more forcefully, and it suddenly slid back like a concertina, separating into seven distinct panels. Lirael didn’t notice that as this happened, one of the three symbols completely disappeared, leaving only two types of studs visible. She was overcome by a sudden surge of Charter Magic that flowed out of the door and somehow into Lirael herself. She felt it coursing through her, infusing her with a heady happiness she had not felt since the Disreputable Dog had first come to banish her loneliness. It swam in her blood, sparked in her breath—then it was gone, and she staggered against the door-frame. At the same time, the impression of the studs on her hands faded before she could see what they meant.
“Whew!” she said, shaking her head, one hand unconsciously feeling for the comforting bulk of the Dog at her side. “What was that?”
“The Door just said hello,” replied the Dog. Slipping from Lirael’s grasp, she was already questing ahead, paws clicking as she essayed the first steps of a flight that spun downwards into the mountain.
“What do you mean?” asked Lirael. The Dog’s upthrust, wagging tail whisked down and around the curve of the spiral. “How can a door say hello? Wait! Wait for me!”
The Disreputable Dog wasn’t known for listening to commands, requests, or even entreaties, but she was waiting about twenty steps lower down. There were fewer Charter marks providing light here, and the steps were covered in dark moss. Clearly no one had passed this way for a very long time.
She looked up as Lirael reached her, then immediately took off down the steps again, easily re-establishing her twenty-step lead, and was once again lost to sight, though Lirael could hear her paws steadily clicking down the steps.
Lirael sighed and followed more slowly, not trusting the moss-covered stair. There was something farther down that she didn’t quite like, and she felt oppressed by some sense of unease, below the level of consciousness. A sort
of vaguely unpleas-ant pressure that was increasing with every downwards step.
The Dog waited, at least momentarily, eight more times before they reached the bottom of the deep stairs. Lirael guessed they were now more than four hundred yards deeper under the mountain than she had ever been before. There were no ice intrusions here, either, adding to her feeling of strangeness. It wasn’t like any other part of the Clayr’s domain.
It kept getting darker, too, the lower they went, the old Charter marks for light fading till there were only a few flickering here and there. Whoever had built this stair had started from the bottom, Lirael realized, looking at the marks. The lower ones were much older and had not been replaced for centuries.
Normally, she didn’t mind the darkness, but it was different here, deep in the mountain. Lirael called up a light herself, two bright Charter marks of illumination that she wove into her hair, to send a bobbing fall of light ahead of her as she descended.
At the bottom of the stairs, the Dog was scratching the back of her ear in front of another Charter-bound door. This one was of stone, and there were some letters carved into it, large, deep-cut letters using the Middle Alphabet, as well as the Charter symbols only a Charter Mage could see.
Lirael bent closer to read them, then recoiled, turned to the steps, and tried to run away. Somehow the Dog got between her legs, tripping her. Lirael fell and lost control of her light spell, and the bright marks went out, twisting back into the endless flow of the Charter.
