Sabriel regained sciousness slowly, her brain fumbling for es to her senses. Hearing came first, but that only caught her own labored breathing, and the creak of her armored coat as she struggled to sit up. For the moment, sight eluded her, and she anicked, afraid of blindness, till memory came. It was night, and she was at the bottom of a sinkhole—a great, circular shaft bored into the ground, by either nature or artifice. From her brief glimpse of it as they』d fallen, she guessed it was easily fifty yards in diameter and a hundred deep. Daylight would probably illumis murky depths, but starlight was insuffit.
Pain came , hard on the heels of memory. A thousand aches and bruises, but no serious injury.
Sabriel wiggled her toes and fingers, flexed muscles in arms, bad legs. They all hurt, but everything seemed to work.
She vaguely recalled the last few seds before impact—Mogget, or the white force, slowing them just before they hit—but the actual instant of the crash might never have been, for she couldn』t remember it. Shock, she thought to herself, in an abstract way, almost like she was diagnosing someone else.
Her hought came some time later, and with it the realization that she must have passed out again. With this awakening, she felt a little sharper, her mind catg some slight breeze to carry her out of the mental doldrums. W by touch, she unstrapped herself a behind her for the pack. In her current state, even a simple Charter-spell fht was out of the question, but there were dles there, and matches, or the clockwniter.
As the match flared, Sabriel』s heart sank. In the small, flickering globe of yellow light, she saw that only the tral cockpit portion of the Paperwing survived—the sad blue and silver corpse of a once marvelous creation. Its wings lay torn and crumpled underh it, and the entire nose se lay some yards away, shorn off pletely. One eye stared up at the circular patch of sky above, but it was no longer fierd alive. Just yellow paint and laminated paper.
Sabriel stared at the wreckage, regret and sorrow c like influenza in her boill the match burnt her fingers. She lit another, and then a dle, expanding both her light and field of vision.
More small pieces of the Paperwing were strewn over a large, open, flat area. Groaning with the effort of motivating bruised muscles, Sabriel levered herself out of the cockpit to have a closer look at the ground.
This revealed the flat area to be man-made; flagstones, carefully laid. Grass had long growweeones, and li upon them, so it was clearly not ret work. Sabriel sat on the cool stones and wondered why anyone would do such work at the bottom of a sinkhole.
Thinking about that seemed to kickstart her befuddled wits and she started to wonder about a few other things. Where, for instance, was the force that had once been Mogget? And what was it? That reminded her to fetch her sword and check the bells.
Her turbanned helmet had rotated around on her head and was almost back-to-front. Slowly, she slid it around, feeling every slight movement all the way down her now very stiff neck.
Balang her first dle on the paving in a pool of cooling wax, she dragged her pad ons out of the wreckage and lit awo dles. She put one dowhe first and took the other to light her way, walking around the destroyed Paperwing, searg for any sign of Mogget. At the dismembered prow of the craft, she gently touched the eyes, wishing she could