Sabriel awoke to soft dlelight, the warmth of a feather bed, and silkes, delightfully smooth under heavy blas. A fire burned briskly in a red-brick fireplad wood-paneled walls gleamed with the dark mystery of well-polished mahogany. A blue-papered ceiling with silver stars dusted across it, faced her newly opened eyes. Two windows fronted each other across the room, but they were shuttered, so Sabriel had no idea what time it was, no more than she had any remembrance of how she』d got there. It was definitely Abhorsen』s House, but her last memory was of fainting on the doorstep.
Gingerly—for even her neck ached from her day and night of travel, fear and flight—Sabriel lifted her head to look around and once agaihe green eyes of the cat that wasn』t a cat.
The creature was lying near her feet, at the end of the bed.
「Who . . . what are you?」 Sabriel asked nervously, suddenly all too aware that she was naked uhe soft sheets. A sensuous delight, but a defenseless one. Her eyes flickered to her sword-belt and bell-bandolier, carefully draped on a clothes-horse he door.
「I have a variety of names,」 replied the cat. It had a strange voice, half-meurr, with hissing on the vowels. 「You may call me Mogget. As to what I am, I was once many things, but now I am only several. Primarily, I am a servant of Abhorsen. Unless you would be kind enough to remove my collar?」
Sabriel gave an uneasy smile, and shook her head firmly. Whatever Mogget was, that collar was the only thing that kept it as a servant of Abhorsen . . . or anybody else. The Charter marks on the collar were quite explicit about that. As far as Sabriel could tell, the binding spell was over a thousand years old. It was quite possible that Mogget was some Free Magic spirit as old as the Wall, or even older. She wondered why her father hadn』t mentio, and with a pang, wished that she had awoken to find her father here, in his house, both their troubles over.
「I thought not,」 said Mogget, bining a careless shrug with a limbering stretch. It . . . or he, for Sabriel felt the cat was definitely mase, jumped to the parquet floor and sauntered over to the fire. Sabriel watched, her trained eye noting that Mogget』s shadow was not always that of a cat.
A knock at the door interrupted her study of the cat, the sharp sound making Sabriel jump nervously, the hair on the back of her neck frizzing to attention.
「It』s only one of the servants,」 Mogget said, in a patronizing tone. 「Charter sendings, and pretty low-grade o that. They always burn the milk.」
Sabriel ignored him, and said, 「e in.」 Her voice shook, and she realized that shaky nerves and weakness would be with her for a while.
The door swung open silently and a short, robed figure drifted in. It was similar to the upper gatewarden, being cowled and so without a visible face, but this one』s habit was of light cream rather than black. It had a simple cotton underdress draped over one arm, a thick towel over the other and its Charter-woven hands held a long woollen surcoat and a pair of slippers.
Without a word, it went to the end of the bed and put the garments on Sabriel』s feet. Then it crossed to a porcelain basin that sat in a silver filigree stand, above a tiled area of the floor to the left of the fire. There, it twisted a bronze wheel, and steaming hot water splashed and gurgled from a pipe in the wall, bringing with it the stench of something sulphurous and unpleasant.