Sabriel (25th Anniversary Classic Edition) by Garth Nix

Author:Garth Nix
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: HarperTeen
Published: 2021-08-03T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nineteen

SABRIEL HAD EXPECTED Belisaere to be a ruined city, devoid of life, but it was not so. By the time they saw its towers, and the truly impressive walls that ringed the peninsula on which the city stood, they also saw fishing boats, of a size with their own. People were fishing from them—normal, friendly people, who waved and shouted as they passed. Only their greeting was telling of how things might be in Belisaere. “Good sun and swift water” was not the typical greeting in Touchstone’s time.

The city’s main harbor was reached from the west. A wide, buoyed channel ran between two hulking defensive outworks, leading into a vast pool, easily as big as twenty or thirty playing fields. Wharves lined three sides of the pool, but most were deserted. To the north and south, warehouses rotted behind the empty wharves, broken walls and holed roofs testimony to long abandonment.

Only the eastern dock looked lively. There were none of the big trading vessels of bygone days, but many small coastal craft, loading and unloading. Derricks swung in and out; longshoremen humped packages along gangplanks; small children dived and swam in between the boats. No warehouses stood behind these wharves—instead, there were hundreds of open-topped booths, little more than brightly decorated frameworks delineating a patch of space, with tables for the wares, and stools for the vendors and favored customers. There seemed to be no shortage of customers in general, Sabriel noted, as Touchstone steered for a vacant berth. People were swarming everywhere, hurrying about as if their time was sadly limited.

Touchstone let the mainsheet go slack, and brought the boat into the wind just in time for them to lose way and glide at an oblique angle into the fenders that lined the wharf. Sabriel threw up a line, but before she could leap ashore and secure it to a bollard, a street urchin did it for her.

“Penny for the knot,” he cried, shrill voice piercing through the hubbub from the crowd. “Penny for the knot, lady?”

Sabriel smiled, with effort, and flicked a silver penny at the boy. He caught it, grinned and disappeared into the stream of people moving along the dock. Sabriel’s smile faded. She could feel many, many Dead here . . . or not precisely here, but further up in the city. Belisaere was built upon four low hills, surrounding a central valley, which lay open to the sea at this harbor. As far as Sabriel’s senses could tell, only the valley was free of the Dead—why, she didn’t know. The hills, which made up at least two-thirds of the city’s area, were infested with them.

This part of the city, on the other hand, could truly be said to be infested with life. Sabriel had forgotten how noisy a city could be. Even in Ancelstierre, she had rarely visited anything larger than Bain, a town of no more than ten thousand people. Of course, Belisaere wasn’t a big city by Ancelstierran standards, and it

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