It was no more than a halfhour』s steady climb to the flat top of Clove, though the path grew steeper and more difficult. The wind was strong now and had cleared the sky, the moonlight giving form to the landscape. But without the clouds, it had grown much colder.
Sabriel sidered a Charter-spell for warmth, but she was tired, and the effort of the spell might ore than the gain in warmth. She stopped instead and shrugged on a fleece-lined oilskin that had been handed down from her father. It was a bit worn and toe, needing severe bug-in with her sword-belt and the baldric that held the bells, but it was certainly windproof.
Feeliively warmer, Sabriel resumed climbing up the last, winding portion of the path, where the ine was so steep the pathmakers had resorted to cutting steps out of the graeps now worn and crumbling, proo sliding away underfoot.
So proo sliding, that Sabriel reached the top without realizing it, head down, her eyes searg in the moonlight for the solid part of the step. Her foot was actually half in the air before she realized that there wasn』t a step.
Clove lay before her. A narre where several slopes of the hill met to form a miniature plateau, with a slight depression in the middle. Snow lay in this depression, a fat, cigarshaped drift, bright in the moonlight, stark white against the red grahere were no trees, ation at all, but in the very ter of the drift, a dark grey stone cast a long moonshadow.
It was twice Sabriel』s girth and three times her height, and looked whole till she walked closer and saw the zigzag crack that cut it down the middle.
Sabriel had never seen a true Charter Stone before, but she khey were supposed to be like the Wall, with Charter marks running like quicksilver through the stone, f and dissolving, only to re-fain, in a neverending story that told of the making of the world.
There were Charter marks on this stone, but they were still, as frozen as the snow. Dead marks, nothing more than meaningless inscriptions, carved into a sculptured stone.
It wasn』t what Sabriel had expected, though she now realized that she hadn』t thought about it properly. She』d thought of lightning or suchlike as the splitter of the stone, but fotten lessons remembered too late told her that wasn』t so. Only some terrible power of Free Magic could split a Charter Stone.
She walked closer to the stone, fear rising in her like a toothache in its first growth, signaling worse to e. The wind was stronger and colder, too, out on the ridge, and the oilskin seemed less f, as its memories of her father brought back remembrance of certain pages of The Book of the Dead and tales of horror told by little girls in the darkness of their dormitory, far from the Old Kingdom.
Fears came with these memories, till Sabriel wrestled them to the back of her mind, and forced herself closer to the stone.
Dark patches of . . . something . . . obscured some of the marks, but it wasn』t until Sabriel pushed her face almost to the stohat she could make out what they were, so dull and bla the moonlight.
When she did see, her head snapped up, and she stumbled backwards, almost overbalang into the snow. The patches were dried blood, and when she saw them, Sabriel knew how the stone had been broken, and why the blood hadn』t been ed away by rain or snow . . . why the stone never would be .
A Charter Mage had been sacrificed oone. Sacrificed by a neao gain access to