Garth Nix - Across The Wall

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GARTH NIX

Across the Wall

A Tale of the ABHORSEN and OTHER Stories

To Anna, Thomas, and Edward and all my family and friends

Contents

Preface IV

Nicholas Sayre and the Creature in the Case 3

Under the Lake 95

Charlie Rabbit 107

From the Lighthouse 125

The Hill The Hill 139

Lightning Bringer 157

Down to the Scum Quarter 173

Heart’s Desire 223

Hansel’s Eyes 237

Hope Chest 253

My New Really Epic Fantasy Series 287

Three Roses 295

Endings 301 About the Author Credits Cover

Copyright About the Publisher

PREFACE

Four years ago, after a Christmas lunch, my younger brother passed around a very small

“book” of four stapled-together pages that he said he’d found while helping my mother clean out a

storage area under the family home. The book contained four stories written in shaky capital

letters, with a couple of half-hearted illustrations done with colored pencils. On the front, it had

“Stories” and “Garth Nix” in the handwriting one would expect from someone aged around six.

The stories included such gems as “The Coin Shower,” which was very short and went

something like:

a boy went outside it started raining coins he picked them

up

I had no memory of this story or the little booklet, and at first I thought it had been fabricated by

my brother as a joke, but my parents remembered me writing the stories and engaging in this bit

of self-publishing at an early age.

I wrote “The Coin Shower” and the other stories in that collection about thirty-five years ago,

and I’ve been writing

V ever since. Not always fiction, though. In my varied writing career I’ve written all kinds of

things, from speeches for CEOs to brochures about brickworks to briefing papers on new Internet

technologies.

I first got into print writing articles and scenarios for the role-playing games “Dungeons and

Dragons” and “Traveler” when I was sixteen or seventeen. I wrote for magazines like M u l t i v e r

s e a n d B r e a k o u t ! in Australia and White Dwarf in the United Kingdom. I tried to crack D r a

g o n magazine in the United States, but never quite managed to sell them anything.

This minor success in getting role-playing game articles or scenarios into print led me to try

my hand at getting some of my fiction published. I’d written quite a few stories here and there

without success, but when I was nineteen years old, I wrote a whole lot more while I was traveling

around the U.K. and Europe, broadening my horizons. I drove all over the place in a beat-up

Austin 1600 with a small metal Silver-Reed typewriter in the backseat, a couple of notebooks, and

lots of other people’s books. Every day I’d write something in longhand in my note-book, and then

that night or perhaps the next morning I’d type up what I’d written. (That established a writing

practice that has continued for more than twenty years: I write most of my novels in longhand,

typing up each chapter on the computer after I’ve got the first draft done in the latest black-and-red

notebook. I now have more than twenty of these notebooks, plus one very out-of-place

blue-and-white-striped notebook that I turned to during the stationery drought of 1996.)

I don’t write everything in longhand first, though; sometimes I just take to the keyboard. Most of

my short fiction begins with handwritten notes, and perhaps a few key sentences put down with

my trusty Waterman fountain pen, but then I start typing.

VI

The pen comes into its own again later, when I print out the story, make my changes and

corrections, and then go back to the com-puter. This process often occurs when I have only part

of the story written. I quite often revise the first third or some small part of a story six or seven

times before I’ve written the rest of it. Often the revision occurs because I have left the story

incomplete for a long time, and I need to revisit the existing part in order to feel my way into the

story again.

Both my short and long fiction works usually begin with a thinly sketched scene, character,

situation, or some combina-tion of all three, which just appears in my head. For example, I might

suddenly visualize a huge old mill by a broad river, the wheel slowly turning, with the sound of the

grinding stones underlaid by the burble of the river. Or I might think of a char-acter, say a

middle-aged man who has turned away from the sorcery of his youth because he is afraid of it,

but who will be forced to embrace it again. Or a situation might emerge from my subconscious, in

which a man, or something that was once a man, is looking down on a group of travelers from a

rocky perch, wondering whether he/it should rob them.

All these beginnings might come together into the story of a miller, once a sorcerer, who is

transformed into a creature as the result of a magical compact he thought he had evaded. So he

must leave his settled life and become a brigand, in the hope of finding, on one of the magicians

or priests he robs on the road, the one item of magical apparatus that can return his human

shape.

Or they might not come together. I have numerous notes for stories, and many partly begun

stories, that have pro-gressed no further. Some of these fragments might be used in my novels,

or at least be the seeds of some elements in one. A few ideas will progress and grow and

become stories, complete in

VII themselves. The great majority of my jotted-down ideas, images, and scraps of writing will

never become anything more than a few lines in a black-and-red notebook.

The stories in this collection are the ones that got past the notes stage, that became a few

paragraphs, then a few pages, and somehow charged on downhill to become complete. They

represent a kind of core sample taken through more than fifteen years of writing, from the callow

author of twenty-five who wrote “Down to the Scum Quarter” to the possibly more pol-ished

forty-one-year-old writer of “Nicholas Sayre and the Creature in the Case.”

Fortunately, you have been spared some even earlier efforts, including the heavily T. H.

White–influenced short story I published in my school magazine at fifteen, and even my very first

professional short story sale, which felt like a great tri-umph for me at nineteen years old but now

looks rather out of place with my later works.

I hope you find some stories here that you will enjoy, or wonder about, or that linger

uncomfortably in the mind when you wish they didn’t. But if your favorite story is “The Coin

Shower,” please do not write and tell me that my writing has been going downhill ever since I was

six.

GARTH NIX December 1, 2004 Sydney, Australia

VIII introduction to nicholas Sayre and the Creature in the Case

I have explored Ancelstierre and the Old Kingdom a little in my novels Sabriel, Lirael, and

Abhorsen, and in the process I have found out (for that’s often what it feels like, even though I’m

the one making it up) quite a lot about these lands, the people and creatures that inhabit them,

and their stories.

But there is much, much more that I don’t know about, and will never know about unless I

need it for a story. Unlike many fantasy writers, I don’t spend a lot of time working out and

recording tons of background detail about the worlds that I make up. What I do is write the story,

pausing every now and then to puzzle out the details or information that I need to know to make

the story work. Some of that background material will end up in the story, though it might be

veiled, myst erious, or tangential. Much more will sit in my head or roughly jotted down in my

note-books, until I need it next time or until I connect it with some-thing else.

Every time I reenter the world of the Old Kingdom and Ancelstierre, I find myself stitching

together leftover bits and pieces that I already knew about, as well as inventing some more that

seem to go with what is already there.

“Nicholas Sayre and the Creature in the Case” was particularly interesting for me to write,

because in it I connect various bits and pieces of information about Ancelstierre, rather than the

Old Kingdom. As always, the story is the most important thing to me, but this novella also gives a

glimpse of the people, customs, govern-ment, technology, and landscape of Ancelstierre.

Like nearly everything I write, this is a fantasy adventure story,

3 across the wall

this time with a dash of country-house mystery, a twist of 1920s-style espionage, and a

humorous little umbrella on the side that may be safely ignored by those who don’t like it (or don’t

get it). Some readers may detect the influence of some of the authors outside the fantasy genre

(as it is usually defined today) whom I admire, includ-ing Dorothy Sayers and P. G. Wodehouse.

Planned to be a longish short story, “Nicholas Sayre and the Creature in the Case” grew and

grew till it became a novella and ended up taking many more months to write than I had

antici-pated. It started with these notes:

Nicholas and Uncle to country house Full of debs and stupid young men Thing in the

Case, eyes follow Nick Autumn haymaking thing gets some of Nick’s blood? refuge

in river, thing closes sluice hay fires in a circle it is powerful, but poisoned how far are

we from the Wall?

That was the kernel, from which a novella grew over about ten months. I don’t know why I

wrote it rather than something else. It wasn’t sold to a publisher, I didn’t have a deadline for it, and

I had plenty of other things to do. But only a week or so after writing those notes, I sat down and

wrote the first three or four pages in one sitting. I kept coming back to it thereafter, caught up (as I

often am as both writer and reader) simply by the desire to see what happened next.

4 Nicholas Sayre and the Creature in the Case

“I am going back to the Old Kingdom, Uncle,” said Nicholas Sayre. “Whatever Father may

have told you. So there is no point in your trying to fix me up with a suitable Sayre job or a suitable

Sayre marriage. I am coming with you to what will undoubtedly be a horrendous house party only

because it will get me a few hundred miles closer to the Wall.”

Nicholas’s uncle Edward, more generally known as The Most Honorable Edward Sayre, Chief

Minister of Ancels-tierre, shut the red-bound letter book he was reading with more emphasis than

he intended, as their heavily armored car lurched over a hump in the road. The sudden clap of the

book made the bodyguard in front look around, but the driver kept his eyes on the narrow country

lane.

“Have I said anything about a job or a marriage?” Edward enquired, gazing down his long,

patrician nose at his nineteen-year-old nephew. “Besides, you won’t even get within a mile of the

Perimeter without a pass signed by me, let alone across the Wall.”

“I could get a pass from Lewis,” said Nicholas moodily,

5 across the wall

referring to the newly anointed Hereditary Arbiter. The previ-ous Arbiter, Lewis’s grandfather,

had died of a heart attack during Corolini’s attempted coup d’état half a year before.

“No, you couldn’t, and you know it,” said Edward. “Lewis has more sense than to involve

himself in any aspect of government other than the ceremonial.”

“Then I’ll have to cross over without a pass,” declared Nicholas angrily, not even trying to hide

the frustration that had built up in him over the past six months, during which he’d been forced to

stay in Ancelstierre. Most of that time spent wishing he’d left with Lirael and Sam in the immediate

aftermath of the Destroyer’s defeat, instead of deciding to recuperate in Ancelstierre. It had been

weakness and fear that had driven his decision, combined with a desire to put the terrible past

behind him. But he now knew that was impossible. He could not ignore the legacy of his

involvement with Hedge and the Destroyer, nor his return to Life at the hands—or paws—of the

Disreputable Dog. He had become someone else, and he could only find out who that was in the

Old Kingdom.

“You would almost certainly be shot if you try to cross illegally,” said Edward. “A fate you

would richly deserve. Particularly since you are not giving me the opportunity to help you. I do not

know why you or anyone else would want to go to the Old Kingdom—my year on the Perimeter as

General Hort’s ADC certainly taught me the place is best avoided. Nor do I wish to annoy your

father and hurt your mother, but there are certain circumstances in which I might grant you

permission to cross the Perimeter.”

“What! Really?”

“Yes, really. Have I ever taken you or any other of my nephews or nieces to a house party

before?”

6 nicholas Sayre and the Creature in the Case

“Not that I know—”

“Do I usually make a habit of attending parties given by someone like Alastor Dorrance in the

middle of nowhere?”

“I suppose not....”

“Then you might exercise your intelligence to wonder why you are here with me now.”

“Gatehouse ahead, sir,” interrupted the bodyguard as the car rounded a sweeping corner and

slowed down. “Recogni-tion signal is correct.”

Edward and Nicholas leaned forward to look through the open partition and the windscreen

beyond. A few hundred yards in front, a squat stone gatehouse lurked just off the road, with its two

wooden gates swung back. Two slate-gray Heddon-Hare roadsters were parked, one on either

side of the gate, with several mackintosh-clad, weapon-toting men stand-ing around them. One of

the men waved a yellow flag in a series of complicated movements that Edward clearly

under-stood and Nicholas presumed meant all was well.

“Proceed!” snapped the Chief Minister. Their car slowed more, the driver shifting down

through the gears with prac-ticed double-clutching. The mackintosh-clad men saluted as the car

swung off the road and through the gate, dropping their salute as the rest of the motorcade

followed. Six motor-cycle policemen were immediately behind, then another two cars identical to

the one that carried Nicholas and his uncle, then another half dozen police motorcyclists, and

finally four trucks that were carrying a company of fully armed soldiery. Corolini’s attempted

putsch had failed, and there had surpris-ingly been no further trouble from the Our Country Party

since, but the government continued to be nervous about the safety of the nation’s Chief Minister.

7 across the wall

“So, what is going on?” asked Nicholas. “Why are you here? And why am I here? Is there

something you want me to do?”

“At last, a glimmer of thought. Have you ever wondered what Alastor Dorrance actually does,

other than come to Corvere three or four times a year and exercise his eccentrici-ties in public?”

“Isn’t that enough?” asked Nick with a shudder. He remembered the newspaper stories from

the last time Dorrance had been in the city, only a few weeks before. He’d hosted a picnic on

Holyoak Hill for every apprentice in Corvere and supplied them with fatty roast beef, copious

amounts of beer, and a particularly cheap and nasty red wine, with predictable results.

“Dorrance’s eccentricities are all show,” said Edward. “Misdirection. He is in fact the head of

Department Thirteen. Dorrance Hall is the Department’s main research facility.”

“But Department Thirteen is just a made-up thing, for the moving pictures. It doesn’t really

exist . . . um . . . does it?”

“Officially, no. In actuality, yes. Every state has need of spies. Department Thirteen trains and

manages ours, and carries out various tasks ill suited to the more regular branches of

government. It is watched over quite carefully, I assure you.”

“But what has that got to do with me?”

“Department Thirteen observes all our neighbors very suc-cessfully, and has detailed files on

everyone and everything important within those countries. With one notable exception. The Old

Kingdom.”

“I’m not going to spy on my friends!”

Edward sighed and looked out the window. The drive beyond the gatehouse curved through

freshly mown fields,

8 nicholas Sayre and the Creature in the Case

the hay already gathered into hillocks ready to be pitch-forked into carts and taken to the

stacks. Past the fields, the chimneys of a large country house peered above the fringe of old oaks

that lined the drive.

“I’m not going to be a spy, Uncle,” repeated Nicholas.

“I haven’t asked you to be one,” said Edward as he looked back at his nephew. Nicholas’s

face had paled, and he was clutching his chest. Whatever had happened to him in the Old

Kingdom had left him in a very run-down state, and he was still recovering. Though the

Ancelstierran doctors had found no external signs of significant injury, his X-rays had come out

strangely fogged and all the medical reports said Nick was in the same sort of shape as a man

who had suffered serious wounds in battle.

“All I want you to do is to spend the weekend here with some of the Department’s technical

people,” continued Edward. “Answer their questions about your experiences in the Old Kingdom,

that sort of thing. I doubt anything will come of it, and as you know, I strictly adhere to the wisdom

of my predecessors, which is to leave the place alone. But that said, they haven’t exactly left us

alone over the past twenty years. Dorrance has always had a bit of a bee in his bonnet about the

Old Kingdom, greatly exacerbated by the...mmm... event at Forwin Mill. It is possible that he might

discover something useful from talking to you. So if you answer his questions, you shall have your

Perimeter pass on Monday morning. If you’re still set on going, that is.”

“I’ll cross the Wall,” said Nick forcefully. “One way or another.”

“Then I suggest it be my way. You know, your father wanted to be a painter when he was your

age. He had talent

9 across the wall

too, according to old Menree. But our parents wouldn’t hear of it. A grave error, I think. Not that

he hasn’t been a useful politician, and a great help to me. But his heart is elsewhere, and it is not

possible to achieve greatness without a whole heart.”

“So all I have to do is answer questions?”

Edward sighed the sigh of an older and wiser man talking to a younger, inattentive, and

impatient relative.

“Well, you will have to appear a little bit at the party. Dinner and so forth. Croquet perhaps, or a

row on the lake. Misdirection, as I said.”

Nicholas took Edward’s hand and shook it firmly.

“You are a splendid uncle, Uncle.”

“Good. I’m glad that’s settled,” said Edward. He glanced out the window. They were past the

oak trees now, gravel crunching beneath the wheels as the car rolled up the drive to the front

steps of the six-columned entrance. “We’ll drop you off, then, and I’ll see you Monday.”

“Aren’t you staying here? For the house party?”

“Don’t be silly! I can’t abide house parties of any kind. I’m staying at the Golden Sheaf.

Excellent hotel, not too far away. I often go there to get through some serious confidential

read-ing. Place has got its own golf course, too. Thought I might go round tomorrow. Enjoy

yourself!”

Nicholas hardly caught the last two words as his door was flung open and he was assisted

out by Edward’s per-sonal bodyguard. He blinked in the afternoon sunlight, no longer filtered

through the smoked glass of the car’s win-dows. A few seconds later, his bags were deposited at

his feet; then the Chief Minister’s cavalcade started up again and rolled out the drive as quickly as

it had arrived, the

10 nicholas Sayre and the Creature in the Case

Army trucks leaving considerable ruts in the gravel.

“Mr. Sayre?”

Nicholas looked around. A top hatted footman was pick-ing up his bags, but it was another

man who had spoken. A balding, burly individual in a dark-blue suit, his hair cut so short it was

practically a monkish tonsure. Everything about him said policeman, either active or recently

retired.

“Yes, I’m Nicholas Sayre.”

“Welcome to Dorrance Hall, sir. My name is Hedge—”

Nicholas recoiled from the offered hand and nearly fell over the footman. Even as he regained

his balance, he realized that the man had said Hodge and then followed it up with a second

syllable.

Hodgeman.Not Hedge.

Hedge the necromancer was finally, completely, and ut-terly dead. Lirael and the Disreputable

Dog had defeated him, and Hedge had gone beyond the Ninth Gate. He couldn’t come back. Nick

knew he was safe from him, but that knowl-edge was purely intellectual. Deep inside him, the

name of Hedge was linked irrevocably with an almost primal fear.

“Sorry,” gasped Nick. He straightened up and shook the man’s hand. “Ankle gave way on me.

You were saying?”

“Hodgeman is my name. I am an assistant to Mr. D o r-rance. The other guests do not arrive

till later, so Mr. Dorrance thought you might like a tour of the grounds.”

“Um, certainly,” replied Nick. He fought back a sudden urge to look around to see who might

be listening and, as he started up the steps, resisted the temptation to slink from shadow to

shadow just like a spy in a moving picture.

“The house was originally built in the time of the last Trouin-Durville Pretender, about four

hundred years ago, but

11 across the wall

little of the original structure remains. Most of the current house was built by Mr. Dorrance’s

grandfather. The best fea-ture is the library, which was the great hall of the old house. Shall we

start there?”

“Thank you,” replied Nicholas. Mr. Hodgeman’s turn as a tour guide was quite convincing.

Nicholas wondered if the man had to do it often for casual visitors, as part of what Uncle Edward

would call “misdirection.”

The library was very impressive. Hodgeman closed the double doors behind them as Nick

stared up at the high dome of the ceiling, which was painted to create the illusion of a storm at

sea. It was quite disconcerting to look up at the waves and the tossing ships and the low scudding

clouds. Below the dome, every wall was covered by tiers of shelves stretching up twenty or even

twenty-five feet from the floor. Ladders ran on rails around the library, but no one was using them.

The library was silent; two crescent-shaped couches in the center were empty. The windows

were heavily curtained with velvet drapes, but the gas lanterns above the shelves burned very

brightly. The place looked like there should be people reading in it, or sorting books, or something.

It did not have the dark, dusty air of a disused library.

“This way, sir,” said Hodgeman. He crossed to one of the shelves and reached up above his

head to pull out an unobtru-sive, dun-colored tome, adorned only with the Dorrance coat of arms,

a chain argent issuant from a chevron argent upon a field azure.

The book slid out halfway, then came no farther.

Hodgeman looked up at it. Nick looked too.

“Is something supposed to happen?”

“It gets a bit stuck sometimes,” replied Hodgeman. He

12 nicholas Sayre and the Creature in the Case

tugged on the book again. This time it came completely out. Hodgeman opened it, took a key

from its hollowed-out pages, pushed two books apart on the shelf below to reveal a key-hole,

inserted the key, and turned it. There was a soft click, but nothing more dramatic. Hodgeman

put the key back in the book and returned the volume to the shelf.

“Now, if you wouldn’t mind stepping this way,” Hodgeman said, leading Nick back to the center

of the library. The couches had moved aside on silent gears, and two steel-encased segments of

the floor had slid open, revealing a circu-lar stone staircase leading down. Unlike the library’s

brilliant white gaslights, it was lit by dull electric bulbs.

“This is all rather cloak-and-dagger,” remarked Nick as he headed down the steps with

Hodgeman close behind him.

Hodgeman didn’t answer, but Nick was sure a disapprov-ing glance had fallen on his back.

The steps went down quite a long way, equivalent to at least three or four floors. They ended in

front of a steel door with a covered spy hole. Hodgeman pressed a tarnished bronze bell button

next to the door, and a few seconds later, the spy hole slid open.

“Sergeant Hodgeman with Mr. Nicholas Sayre,” said Hodgeman.

The door swung open. There was no sign of a person behind it. Just a long, dismal,

white-painted concrete corridor stretching off some thirty or forty yards to another steel door. Nick

stepped through the doorway, and some slight move-ment to his right made him look. There was

an alcove there, with a desk, a red telephone on it, a chair, and a guard— another plainclothes

policeman type like Hodgeman, this time in shirtsleeves, with a revolver worn openly in a shoulder

hol-ster. He nodded at Nick but didn’t smile or speak.

13 across the wall

“On to the next door, please,” said Hodgeman.

Nick nodded back at the guard and continued down the concrete corridor, his footsteps

echoing just out of time with Hodgeman’s. He heard behind him the faint ting of a tele-phone being

taken off its cradle and then the low voice of the guard, his words indistinguishable.

The procedure with the spy hole was repeated at the next door. There were two policemen

behind this one, in a larger and better-appointed alcove. They had upholstered chairs and a

leather-topped desk, though it had clearly seen better days.

Hodgeman nodded at the guards, who nodded back with slow deliberation. Nick smiled but got

no smile in return.

“Through the left door, please,” said Hodgeman, pointing. There were two doors to choose

from, both of unappealing, unmarked steel bordered with lines of knuckle-size rivets.

Hodgeman departed through the right-hand door as Nick pushed the left, but it swung open

before he exerted any pres-sure. There was a much more cheerful room beyond, very much like

Nick’s tutor’s study at Sunbere, with four big leather club chairs facing a desk, and off to one side

a liquor cabinet with a large, black-enameled radio sitting on top of it. There were three men

standing around the cabinet.

The closest was a tall, expensively dressed, vacant-looking man with ridiculous sideburns

whom Nick recognized as Dorrance. The second-closest was a fiftyish man in a hearty tweed

coat with leather elbow patches. The skin of his thick neck hung over his collar, and his fat face

was much too big for the half-moon glasses that perched on his nose. Lurking behind these two

was a nondescript, vaguely unhealthy-looking shorter man who wore exactly the same kind of suit

as Hodgeman but in a much more untidy way, so he looked

14 nicholas Sayre and the Creature in the Case

nothing like a policeman, serving or otherwise.

“Ah, here is Mr. Nicholas Sayre,” said Dorrance. He stepped forward, shook Nick’s hand, and

ushered him to the center of the room. “I’m Dorrance. Good of you to help us out. This is

Professor Lackridge, who looks after all our scientific research.”

The fat-faced man extended his hand and shook Nick’s with little enthusiasm but a crushing

grip. Somewhere in the very distant past, Nick surmised, Professor Lackridge must have been a

rugby enthusiast. Or perhaps a boxer. Now, sadly, run to fat, but the muscle was still there

underneath.

“And this is Mr. Malthan, who is . . . an independent adviser on Old Kingdom matters.”

Malthan inclined his head and made a faint, repressed ges-ture with his hands, turning them

toward his forehead as if to brush his almost nonexistent hair away. There was something about

the action that triggered recognition in Nick.

“You’re from the Old Kingdom, aren’t you?” he asked. It was unusual for anyone from the Old

Kingdom to be encoun-tered this far south. Very few travelers could get authorization from both

King Touchstone and the Ancelstierran government to cross the Wall and the Perimeter. Even

fewer would come any farther south than Bain, which was at least a hundred and eighty miles

north. They didn’t like it, as a rule. It didn’t feel right, Sam had always said.

But then, this little man didn’t have the Charter Mark on his forehead, which might make it

more bearable for him to be on this side of the Wall. Nick instinctively brushed his dark forelock

aside to show his Charter Mark, his fingers running across it. The Mark was quiescent under his

touch, showing no sign of its connection to the magical powers of the Old Kingdom.

15 across the wall

Malthan clearly saw the Mark, even if the others didn’t. He stepped a little closer to Nick and

spoke in a breathy half whine.

“I’m a trader, out of Belisaere,” he said. “I’ve always done a bit of business with some folks in

Bain, as my father did before me, and his father before him. We’ve a Permission from the King,

and a Permit from your government. I only come down here every now and then, when I’ve got

something special-like that I know Mr. Dorrance’s lot will be interested in, same as my old dad did

for Mr. Dorrance’s granddad—”

“And we pay very well for what we’re interested in, Mr. Malthan,” Dorrance interrupted him.

“Don’t we?”

“Yes, sir, you do. Only I don’t—”

“Malthan has been very useful,” interjected Professor Lackridge. “Though we must discount

many of his, ahem, traveler’s tales. Fortunately he tends to bring us interesting artifacts in addition

to his more colorful observations.”

“I’ve always spoken true,” said Malthan. “As this young man can tell you. He has the Mark and

all. He knows.”

“Yes, the forehead brand of that cult,” remarked Lackridge, with an uninterested glance at

Nick’s forehead, the Mark mostly concealed once more under his floppy forelock. “Sociologically

interesting, of course. Particularly its regret-table prevalence among our Northern Perimeter

Reconnais-sance Unit. I trust it is only an affectation in your case, young man? You haven’t gone

native on us?”

“It isn’t just a religious thing,” Nick said carefully. “The Mark is more ofa...a connection with . . .

how can I ex-plain...unseenpowers. Magic—”

“Yes, yes. I am sure it seems like magic to you,” said Lackridge. “But the great majority of it is

easily explained as mass hallucination, the influence of drugs, hysteria, and so

16 nicholas Sayre and the Creature in the Case

forth. It is the minority of events that defy explanation but leave clear physical effects that we

are interested in—such as the explosion at Forwin Mill.” He looked over his half-moon glasses at

Nicholas.

Dorrance looked at him as well, his stare suddenly intense.

“Our studies there indicate that the blast was roughly equivalent to the detonation of twenty

thousand tons of nitro-cellulose,” continued Lackridge. He rapped his knuckles on the desk as he

exclaimed, “Twenty thousand tons! We know of nothing capable of delivering such explosive

force, particu-larly as the bomb itself was reported to be two metallic hemi-spheres, each no

more than ten feet in diameter. Is that right, Mr. Sayre?”

Nick swallowed, his throat moving in a dry gulp. He could feel sweat forming on his forehead

and a familiar jangling pain in his right arm and chest.

“I ...I don’t really know,” he said after several long sec-onds. “I was very ill. Feverish. But it

wasn’t a bomb. It was the Destroyer. Not something our science can explain. That was my

mistake. I thought I could explain everything under our natural laws, our science. I was wrong.”

“You’re tired, and clearly still somewhat unwell,” said Dorrance. His tone was kindly, but the

warmth did not reach his eyes. “We have many more questions, of course, but they can wait until

the morning. Professor, why don’t you show Nicholas around the establishment. Let him get his

bearings. Then go back upstairs, and we can all resume life as normal, what? Which reminds

me, Nicholas—everything discussed down here is absolutely confidential. Even the existence of

this facility must not be mentioned once you return to the main house. Naturally you will see me,

Professor Lackridge, and the

17 across the wall

others at dinner, but in our public roles. Most of the guests have no idea that Department

Thirteen lurks beneath their feet, and we want it to remain that way. I trust you won’t have a

problem keeping our existence all to yourself?”

“No, not at all,” muttered Nick. Inside he was wondering how he could avoid answering

questions but still get his pass to cross the Perimeter. Lackridge obviously didn’t believe in Old

Kingdom magic, which was no great surprise. After all, Nick had been like that himself. But

Dorrance had voiced no such skepticism, nor had he shown it by his body language. Nick

definitely did not want to discuss the Destroyer and its nature with anyone who might seriously

look into what it was or what had happened at Forwin Mill.

He didn’t want to dabble in anything to do with Old Kingdom magic, especially without proper

instruction, even two hundred miles south of the Wall.

“Follow me, Nicholas,” said Lackridge. “You, too, Malthan. I want to show you something

related to those pho-tographic plates you found for us.”

“I need to catch my train,” muttered Malthan. “My horses...stabled near Bain . . . the expense .

. . I’m eager to return home.”

“We’ll pay you a little extra,” said Dorrance, the tone of his voice making it clear Malthan had

no choice. “I want Lackridge to see your reaction to one of the artifacts we’ve picked up. I’ll see

you at dinner, Nicholas.”

Dorrance shook Nick’s hand in parting, gave a dismissive wave to Lackridge, and ignored

Malthan completely. As Dorrance turned back to his desk, Nick noticed a paperweight sitting on

top of the wooden in-box. A lump of broken stone, etched with intricate symbols. They did not

shine or move

18 nicholas Sayre and the Creature in the Case

about, not so far from the Old Kingdom; but Nick recognized their nature, though he did not

know their dormant power or meaning. They were Charter Marks. The stone itself looked as if it

Garth Nix - Across The Wall

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