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“What! What was that!” barked the Dog, who was practically under her feet. Clearly, she had sensed that Lirael had been attacked.
“A n-necromancer,” said Lirael, shivering. “The one . . . the vision . . . that the Clayr showed me. Hedge. He . . . he . . . almost killed me!”
The Dog growled, low in her throat, and Lirael suddenly noticed that she had grown as tall as her own shoulder and now sported much larger and sharper teeth. “I knew I should have stayed with you, Mistress!”
“Yes, yes,” mumbled Lirael. She still could hardly speak, her breath coming in little panicked pants. She knew the necromancer couldn’t follow her back here—he would have to return to his own body in Life. Unfortunately, her little Kibeth pipe wouldn’t have walked him far. He was easily powerful enough to come back and send Dead spirits through to pursue her. The bodiless ones.
“He’ll send something after me. We’ve got to get out of here!”
The Dog growled again but didn’t object as Lirael stumbled back across the stony island, intent on getting aboard Finder as quickly as possible. She circled behind Lirael, so every time the girl looked back nervously, there was the Dog, standing between her and danger.
A few minutes later, safe in the swift waters of the Ratterlin, Lirael collapsed from the shock, lying down in the boat with just one hand lightly touching the rudder. Finder could be trusted to steer her own course.
“I would have bitten that necromancer’s throat out,” said the Dog, after letting Lirael gasp and shake for several minutes. “He’d have had cause to remember my teeth!”
“I don’t think he would notice if you did rip his throat out,” said Lirael, shivering. “He felt more Dead than alive. He said, ‘I know you,’ ” she continued slowly, looking up at the sky, angling her face back to catch more of the sun, delighting in its blessed heat upon her still frosted lips and nose. “How could he know me?”
“Free Magic eats up necromancers,” said the Dog, shrinking herself down to a less belligerent and more conversational size. “The power they seek to wield—the Free Magic they profess to master—ultimately devours them. That power recognizes your Blood. That’s probably what he meant by ‘I know you.’ ”
“I don’t like the thought of anyone outside the Glacier knowing me,” said Lirael, shuddering. “Knowing who I am. And that necromancer’s probably with Nicholas now, in Life. So when I find Nicholas, I’ll find the necromancer. Like a bug going to a spider to find a fly.”
“Tomorrow’s trouble,” said the Dog, soothing her, not very convincingly. “At least we’re done with today’s. We’re safe on the river.”
Lirael nodded, thinking. Then she sat up and scratched the Dog under the chin and all around her ears.
“Dog,” she said hesitantly, “there’s Free Magic in you, maybe even more than the Charter Magic in your collar. Why don’t you . . . why aren’t you . . . why aren’t you like the necromancer?”
The Dog sighed, with a meaty “oof” that made Lirael wrinkle her nose. The hound tilted her head to one side, thinking before she answered.
“In the Beginning, all magic was Free Magic—unconstrained, raw, unchanneled. Then the Charter was created, which took most of the Free Magic and made it ordered, subject to structure, constrained by symbols. The Free Magic that remained separate from the Charter is the Free Magic of necromancy, of Stilken, Margrue, and Hish, of Analem and Gorger, and all the other fell creatures, constructs, and familiars. It is the random magic that persists outside the Charter.
“There is also the Free Magic that helped make the Charter but was not consumed by it,” continued the Dog. “That is quite different from the Free Magic that would not join in the creation of the Charter.”
“You speak of the Beginning,” said Lirael, who wasn’t at all sure she understood. “But could that be before the Charter? It doesn’t have a Beginning—or an End.”
“Everything has a Beginning,” replied the Dog. “Including the Charter. I should know, since I was there at the birth of it, when the Seven chose to make the Charter and the Five gave themselves to the making. In a sense, you were there too, Mistress. You are descended from the Five.”
“The Five Great Charters?” asked Lirael, fascinated by this information. “I remember the rhyme about that. It must have been one of the first things we memorized as children.”
She sat up even straighter, and clasped her hands behind her back, unconsciously assuming the recital position she’d learned as a child.
“Five Great Charters knit the land,
Together linked, hand in hand.
One in the people who wear the crown,
Two in the folk who keep the Dead down,
Three and Five became stone and mortar,
Four sees all in frozen water.”
“Yes,” said the Dog. “A good rhyme for pups to learn. The Great Charters are the keystones of the Charter. The bloodlines, the Wall, and the Charter Stones all come from the original sacrifice of the Five, who poured their power into the men and women who were your ancestors. Some of those, in turn, passed that power into stone and mortar, when blood alone was judged to be too easily diluted or led astray.”
“So if the Five were sort of . . . dissolved into the Charter, what happened to the other two?” asked Lirael, digesting this information with a frown. Everything she had read said the Charter had always existed and always would. “You said there were Seven who chose to make the Charter.”
“It began with the Nine,” replied the Dog quietly. “Nine who were most powerful, who possessed the conscious thought and foresight that raised them above all the tens of thousands of Free Magic beings that clamored and strove to exist upon the earth. Yet of the Nine, only Seven agreed to make the Charter. One chose to ignore the Seven’s work but was finally bound to serve the Charter. The Ninth fought and was barely defeated.”
“That’s number eight and nine,” said Lirael, counting on her fingers. “This would be much easier to understand if they had names instead of numbers. Anyway, you still haven’t explained what happened to . . . um . . . six and seven. Why didn’t they become part of the Great Char
ters?”
“They put a great deal of their power into the bloodlines, but not all their being,” replied the Dog. “But I suspect they were perhaps less tired of conscious, individual existence. They wished to go on, in some form or another. I think they wanted to see what happened. And the Seven did have names. They are remembered in the bells and in the pipes you have in your belt. Each of those bells has something of the original power of the Seven, the power that existed before the Charter.”
“You’re not . . . you’re not one of the Seven, are you?” asked Lirael, after a moment of anxiety-laden silence. She couldn’t imagine that one of the creators of the Charter, no matter how much power it had given away, would condescend to be her friend. Or would continue to do so once its true loftiness had been established.
“I’m the Disreputable Dog,” replied the Dog, licking Lirael’s face. “Just a leftover from the Beginning, freely given to the Charter. And I’ll always be your friend, Lirael. You know that.”
“I guess I do,” replied Lirael doubtfully. She hugged the Dog tight, her face pressed into the hound’s warm neck. “I’ll always be your friend, too.”
The Dog let Lirael keep on hugging, but her ears were pricked, listening to the world around them. Her nose kept sniffing the air, trying to get more of the scent that had come back from Death with Lirael. A disturbing scent, one the Dog hoped was purely from her own imagination and long memory, because it was not the smell of just one human necromancer, no matter how powerful. It was much, much older, and much more frightening.
Lirael stopped hugging when the Dog’s wet smell began to overcome her, and she moved back to take the tiller. Finder kept steering herself, but Lirael felt a surge of welcome recognition as Charter marks blossomed under her hand, warm and comforting after the chill of Death.
“We’ll probably see the Sindle Ferry later today,” remarked Lirael, her brow furrowing as she recalled the maps she had rolled, unrolled, catalogued, and repaired in the Library. “We’re making good time—we must have come twenty leagues already!”
