“Oops,” said the Dog, sitting down and resting her head on her paws. “Sorry, Mistress.”
“Mistress?” exclaimed Greene, his face going even redder. “Who are you two? And what is that?”
Sam sighed and said, “I am Prince Sameth of the Old Kingdom, and my companion is Lirael, the Abhorsen-in-Waiting. The Dog is a friend. We are all under a glamour. Do I have your permission to remove it? We’ll glow a bit, but it isn’t dangerous.”
The Major looked redder-faced than ever, but he nodded.
A few minutes later Sam and Lirael stood in front of Major Greene wearing their own clothes and faces. Both were obviously very tired and clearly had suffered much in recent times. The Major looked at them carefully, then down at the Dog. Her breastplate had disappeared and her collar changed, and she looked larger than before. She met his gaze with a sorrowful eye, then spoilt it by winking.
“It is Prince Sameth,” declared Lieutenant Tindall, who’d edged around to see their faces. There was a strange expression on his face. A sympathetic look, and he nodded twice at Sameth, who looked surprised. “And she looks... I beg your pardon, ma’am. I mean to say you look very like Sabriel, I mean the Abhorsen.”
“Yes, I am Prince Sameth,” said Sam slowly, with little expectation that this overweight, soon-to-be-retired Major would be much help. “I urgently need to contact Colonel Dwyer.”
“The phone doesn’t work,” replied the Major. “Besides, Colonel Dwyer is on leave. What’s this urgent need to communicate?”
Lirael answered him, her voice cracked and croaking from the onset of a cold, caused by the sudden transition from a warm Old Kingdom summer to the Ancelstierran spring. The oil lamp flared as she spoke, sending her shadow flickering and dancing across the table.
“An ancient and terrible evil is being brought into Ancelstierre. We need help to find It and stop It – before It destroys your country and then our own.”
The Major looked at her, his red face set in a frown. But it wasn’t a frown of disbelief, as Sam had feared.
“If I didn’t know what your title signified, and recognise the bells you wear,” the Major said slowly, “I would suspect you of overstatement. I don’t think I have ever heard of an evil so powerful it could destroy my entire country. I wish I weren’t hearing about it now.”
“It is called the Destroyer,” said Lirael, her voice soft but charged with the fear that had been growing since they had left the Red Lake. “It is one of the Nine Bright Shiners, the Free Spirits of the Beginning. It was bound and broken by the Seven and buried deep beneath the ground. Only now the two metal hemispheres that hold It prisoner have been dug up by a necromancer called Hedge, and even as we talk here, he could be bringing them across the Wall.”
“So that’s what it is,” said the Major, but there was no satisfaction in his voice. “I had a carrier pigeon from Brigade about trouble to the west and a defence alert, but there’s been nothing since. Hedge, you say? I knew a sergeant of that name, in the Scouts when I first joined. Couldn’t be him, though – that was thirty-five years ago and he was fifty if he was a day—”
“Major, I have to get to a telephone!” interrupted Sameth.
“At once!” declared the Major. He seemed to be recalled to a more vigorous and perhaps younger version of himself. “Mister Tindall, pull your platoon in and tell Edward and CSM Porrit to organise a move. I’m going to take these two—”
“Three,” said the Dog.
“Four,” interrupted Mogget, poking his head out of Sam’s pack. “I’m tired of keeping quiet.”
“He’s a friend too,” Lirael assured the soldiers hastily, as hands once more went for swords and bayonets swung back. “Mogget is the cat and the Disreputable Dog is the... um... dog. They are... er... servants of the Clayr and the Abhorsen.”
“Just like the Perimeter! It never rains but it pours,” declared the Major. “Now, I’m going to take you four back to the reserve line road and we’ll try the phone there. Francis, follow to the transport rendezvous as fast as you can.”
He paused and added, “I don’t suppose you know where this Hedge is going, if they’ve got across the Perimeter?”
“Forwin Mill, where there is something called a Lightning Farm that they will use to free the Destroyer,” said Lirael. “They may have no difficulty getting across the Perimeter. Hedge has the Chief Minister’s nephew with him, Nicholas Sayre, and they’re being met by someone who has a letter from the Chief Minister allowing them to bring the hemispheres in.”
“That wouldn’t be sufficient,” declared the Major. “I suppose it might work at the Crossing Point, but there’d be hours of to and fro with Garrison at Bain and even Corvere. No one in their right mind would fall for it on the real Perimeter. They’ll have to fight their way through, though if an alert was sounded an hour ago, they probably already have. Orderly!”
A corporal, a burning cigarette disguised in one cupped hand, poked his head into the dugout entrance.
“Get me a map that covers Forwin Mill, somewhere west of here! I’ve never heard of the bloody place.”
“It’s about thirty miles down the coast from here, sir,” volunteered Tindall, stopping in mid rush for the exit. “I’ve been fishing there – there’s a loch with quite good salmon. It is a few miles outside the Perimeter Zone, sir.”
“Is it? Humph!” remarked Greene, his face once again turning a deeper shade of red. “What else is there?”
“There was an abandoned sawmill, a broken-down dock, and what’s left of the railway they once used to bring the trees down from the hills,” said Tindall. “I don’t know what this Lightning Farm might be, but there is—”
“Nicholas had the Lightning Farm built there,” interrupted Lirael. “Quite recently, I think.”
“Any people about the place?” asked the Major.
“There are now,” replied Lieutenant Tindall. “Two Southerling refugee camps were built there late last year. Norris and Erimton they’re called, in the hills immediately above the loch valley. There might be fifty thousand refugees there, I suppose, under police guard.”
“If the Destroyer is made whole, they will be among the first to die,” said the Dog. “And Hedge will reap their spirits as they cross into Death, and they will serve him.”
“We’ll have to get them out of there, then,” said the Major. “Though being outside the Perimeter makes it difficult for us to do anything. General Tindall will understand. I only hope General Kingswold has gone home. He’s an Our Country supporter through and through—”
“We must hurry!” Lirael suddenly interrupted. There was no time for more talk. A terrible sense of foreboding gripped her, as if every second they spent here was a grain of sand lost from a nearly empty hourglass. “We have to get to Forwin Mill before Hedge and the hemispheres!”
“Right!” shouted Major Greene, suddenly energised again. He seemed to need spurring along every now and then. He snatched up his helmet, threw it on his head and snagged his revolver by the lanyard with the return motion. “Carry on, Mister Tindall. Quickly now!”
Everything did happen very quickly then. Lieutenant Tindall disappeared into the night and the Major led them at a trot down another communications trench. Eventually it rose out of the ground and became a simple track, identified every few yards with a white-painted rock that shone faintly in the starlight. There was no moon, though one had risen on the Old Kingdom side, and it was much colder here.
Twenty minutes later, the wheezing – but surprisingly fit – Major slowed to a walk and the track joined a wide asphalt road that stretched as far as they could see by starlight, due east and west. Telephone poles lined the road, part of the network that connected the full length of the Perimeter.