“They live,” replied the Dog. “Though not without scathe. My mistress lost her hand. Prince Sameth will make her one, of course, of shining gold and clever magic. Lirael Goldenhand, she’ll be for ever after. Remembrancer and Abhorsen, and much else besides. But there are other hurts, which require different remedies. She is very young. Stand up, Nicholas.”

Nicholas stood. He wavered a little as the current tried to trip him and take him under.

“I gave you a late baptism to preserve your spirit,” said the Dog. “You bear the Charter mark on your forehead now, to balance the Free Magic that lingers in your blood and bone. You will find Charter mark and Free Magic both boon and burden, for they will take you far from Ancelstierre, and the path you will walk will not be the one you have long thought to see ahead.”

“What do you mean?” asked Nick in bewilderment. He touched the mark on his forehead and blinked as it flared with sudden light. The Dog’s collar shone too, with many other bright marks that surrounded her head with a corona of golden light. “What do you mean, far from Ancelstierre? How can I go anywhere? I’m dead, aren’t—”

“I’m sending you back,” said the Dog gently, nudging Nick’s leg with her snout, so he turned to face towards Life. Then she barked, a single sharp sound that was both a welcome and a farewell.

“Is this allowed?” asked Nick as he felt the current reluctantly release him, and he took the first step back.

“No,” said the Dog. “But then I am the Disreputable Dog.”

Nick took another step, and he smiled as he felt the warmth of Life, and the smile became a laugh, a laugh that welcomed everything, even the pain that waited in his body.

In Life, his waking eyes looked up and he saw the sun breaking through a low, dark cloud, and its warmth and light fell on a diamond-shaped patch of earth where he lay, safe amidst ruin and destruction. Nick sat up and saw soldiers approaching, picking their way across an ashen desert. Southerlings followed the soldiers, their just-scrubbed hats and scarves bright blue, the only colour in the wasteland.

A white cat suddenly appeared next to Nicholas’s feet. He sniffed in disgust and said, “I might have known”; then he looked past Nick at something that wasn’t there and winked, before trotting off in a northerly direction.

The cat was followed a little later by the weary footsteps of six people, who were supporting the seventh. Nick managed to stand and wave, and in the space of that tiny movement and its startled response, he had time to wonder what all the future held, and think that it would be much brighter than the past.

The Disreputable Dog sat with her head cocked to one side for several minutes, her wise old eyes seeing much more than the river, her sharp ears hearing more than just the gurgle of the current. After a while a small, enormously satisfied rumble sounded from deep in her chest. She got up, grew her legs longer to get her body out of the water and shook herself dry. Then she wandered off, following a zigzag path along the border between Life and Death, her tail wagging so hard, the tip of it beat the river into a froth behind her.

Extra...

Garth Nix answers

FAQs...

The following is a small selection of the questions I am asked by readers via mail or in letters. The answers are those current at the time this book went to press, so there is always the possibility some of the answers will change.

Are you going to write another book about Sabriel?

I’m unlikely to write another book in which Sabriel is the main character. I do however, have notes for two novels set in the Old Kingdom and Ancelstierre. One is about Chlorr of the Mask and her early life, it takes place several hundred years before the events in Sabriel. Another is set about three years after ‘Nicholas Sayre and the Creature in the Case’ and would see some of the main characters from Abhorsen return. Despite the fact that I have these notes, I may not write the books.

How do you pronounce Sabriel, Lirael and Ancelstierre?

I always say you can pronounce the names however you like. I

sometimes change how I pronounce them myself. However:

Sabriel SAB-REE-ELLE or SAY-BREE-ELLE

Lirael LI-RAY-ELLE (with the ‘Li’ as in ‘lift’)

Ancelstierre AN-SELL-STEE-AIR

Will there be a movie of Sabriel and the other books in the trilogy?

Maybe. I’ve always said I’d rather have no movie than a bad movie. I can only influence this by carefully choosing who I sell the film rights to, and, in my case, by attempting to sell those rights not directly to a studio but as part of a ‘package’ that includes a writer (or co-writer) and director whose work I admire and trust. Even if I manage to do this and at various times this has looked likely, a movie still might not get made. If it is going to happen, you’ll hear about it!

What’s Touchstone’s real name?

Have a look at the last chapter of Abhorsen (not the epilogue), when the seven are attempting to bind Orannis. Touchstone uses his true name then.

The map on the front page describes one area, is there more to this world?

Yes. There is much more to both the world of Ancelstierre (some other countries are mentioned in Lirael and Abhorsen) and the world of the Old Kingdom. In effect there are two worlds which overlap or impinge on each other only in an area roughly described by the Wall and out to sea for some distance.

Why did you choose bells as the tools of necromantic magic?

It’s always difficult to work out where particular ideas come from. However, in the case of the bells that necromancers and the Abhorsens use, I think there were two points of inspiration. The first was that I was trying to think up a kind of magic that was a bit different to that normally encountered in fantasy fiction, and as it was to be used by the Abhorsens I was looking into folklore about exorcising evil spirits and so on.

Possibly the most famous form of exorcism is by ‘bell, book and candle’. That set me to thinking. Books were out, because I wanted something different from books of spells. Candles were out because they would not be very dramatic and also highly impractical (at least so I thought back then, I have since considered ways they could work). That left me with bells.

Around the same time, from reading Dorothy L. Sayers’ murder mystery The Nine Tailors, I became aware that church bells often had names. That led me to look into the naming of bells. The two inspirations converged and I made up the seven bells, with their names and characteristics.

Where do you get your ideas?

Ideas do not, as a rule, spring fully-formed into or out of any writer’s head, unless you put something in that head in the first place. You need to fill your mind and memory and both consciously and subconsciously work with all the material you have gathered to create ideas.

I personally gather ‘raw idea material’ from everything that goes on around me, from everything that I observe and experience, either directly or vicariously. I get ideas from my own life, from other people’s lives, from reading (particularly history, biography, myths and legends), from television, from the Internet. I might get ideas from observing people in the street; from incidents in, or details of, history; from myth and legend; from landscape; from the living natural world; from the sciences; from all the fiction I’ve ever read.

By ‘ideas’ I don’t mean fully-fledged plots, situations or characters, for these are expressions of ideas, things that are worked up from the raw material. The fleeting bits of information that lodge in my head could include ‘ideas’ like:

• The look of the sky in spring when a light rain is falling at sunset